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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24426238">Wist</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/speckledsolanaceae/pseuds/speckledsolanaceae'>speckledsolanaceae</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>NCT (Band)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Bird/Human Hybrids, Blood and Injury, Crimes &amp; Criminals, Emotional Trauma, Fantasy Racial/National Tensions, Grief, M/M, Non-Consensual Touching, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Secrets, Several Forms of Enduring Tension, Sex Work, Sharing a Bed, There Was Only One Hospice, Torture, War Trauma, insignificant character death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-05-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 07:22:50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>83,282</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24426238</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/speckledsolanaceae/pseuds/speckledsolanaceae</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Yuta's lived through a war. He can survive sleeping under the wings of a thief each night. </p><p>All’s fair in love and larceny.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Nakamoto Yuta</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>164</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>268</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Under Your Graceful Nose</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImJaebabie/gifts">ImJaebabie</a>.</li>



    </ul><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>For my dearest Wendy, who brings joy and warmth and cackling laughter into my life.<br/>Two warnings:<br/>1) This chapter has heterosexual sex. One or both of these men know they're sexy and aren't afraid to use their powers for evil.<br/>2) The characters are older than Yuta and Jaehyun are irl</p><p><b><span class="big">In regards to fic tags:</span></b><br/>The particularly triggering tags do <em>not</em> apply to YuJae's relationship with each other (i.e. Jaehyun does <em>not</em> torture Yuta or vice versa).</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The rondel dagger charmed and engraved by the witchsmith back in Hazel’s Keep had cost Yuta an entire liter of sweat and hysteria, but it cut between the stones of the tower walls like butter. The entire ascent was half rondel, half chipped nails as he found and lunged for decaying stone and thick vinework that would let him dig into the climb with scarred hands. It was a sweaty thing, and even after years of scaling forbidden facades and trees and crags to get to his goal, his arms still shook after a certain point, abdomen clenching as he clung to his ropeless task.</p><p>His dagger sung every time he slid it out between stones where the thick shagging of trumpet vines didn’t grow to help him, forcing him to tamp it against his cheek or shoulder before shucking it into a new crack. It held—just like the witchsmith had said it would. The town swallowed the late sun behind and below him, enfolded by orange and pink striking the white stone of shop corners and neatly-cobbled streets. He knew this only because he rested with his cheek pressed against the clinging vine-work, the edge of stone digging into his jaw and a flower invading his eyelashes.</p><p>The world was hot, but the air swirled around the fortress he was climbing, sticking the salt of his sweat to his back like a sheet of damp paper.</p><p>He heaved out a breath and continued for the last stretch, arms aching and a drip of sweat shivering on the tip of his nose.</p><p>It took him two handfuls of vine away from the windowsill and open panes for him to hear something. A specific thing. He paused, leveraging his arm under a sturdy swathe of vine, and wiped his dagger-sweaty palm on the cloth of his pants. Some distance above, he could hear the scraggly stroll of a guard behind the parapets, and if he hung off the vines any more, he’d be out of the blindspot that hid him from the lower treads he’d long passed. From the inner fortress—the sprawl of practicing battlements and training grounds, he could hear a clarion reeding through the air, solitary and alone.</p><p>But above it all were whispers, a single, protracted groan, and if he fumbled to clamp the charm around his wrist between his teeth, he could hear all the sounds resonating through his skull like a concert. And one familiar voice.</p><p>Yuta dropped the charm from between his lips and laughed. He pressed his mouth to his shoulder and shook through a brief tremor of silent humor because he didn’t trust the wind to whip his guffaw away.</p><p>He swore with feeling, though those feelings weren’t clear, and felt a smile dig its path in his lips and cheek. Climbing the last two stretches, he wanted to collapse over the sill and gag with laughter over the sight that greeted him.</p><p>He had about five seconds of anonymity before Jaehyun saw him, and Yuta couldn’t judge him for how long it took him to notice his climb-sweaty state of disarray when it must have been difficult to keep his wits <em> and </em> be balls-deep in the fortress’s lady.</p><p>Yuta wanted to bawl. The image was hysterical. The room awash with a peach glow, luxurious sheets in opulent dishevelment, the beams of the oaken poster shaking with a nearly-aborted thrust, the lady’s bitten-pink mouth raising an oratory at how good she felt, and Jaehyun. Jaehyun, not even looking at the wooed lady whom he’d managed to bed, glaring at Yuta hefting himself over the windowsill with undisguised outrage because they were both here for the same thing.</p><p>It was precious how Jaehyun’s dimples dug so deep even in panicked anger, eyes squeezed in livid betrayal. Jaehyun reached up into the grid of the bedframe’s upper beams with one hand and planted the other near her flushed waist and shifted.</p><p>Yuta had nearly missed Jaehyun’s wings, though Mother knew how. They fell like a curtain around the lady and her bliss-frozen face, glossy black and shining brown at the edges of his vanes from the theatrically beautiful lighting. He could almost feel their sharp glow, the soft rustle tangling with Jaehyun’s measured breaths as he dared not stop moving and the lady’s sweet call of pleasure. </p><p>For the most absurd moment as Yuta righted himself on the flagstone floors and sheathed his rondel, he thought Jaehyun was protecting her perky-breasted dignity.</p><p>It was utterly undignified to be fucked by a malefactor and thief. Jaehyun had already brought her low—what was the point in extending her protection from eyes she couldn’t even see?</p><p>Then, like a suncat stretching up through his chest, Yuta realized that Jaehyun was protecting <em> him. </em> No. Them both. Because Yuta had put him in a sudden tight spot and the safest option was covering Yuta’s ass as if Jaehyun’s dimpled bum weren’t the one out in the open if it weren't for his tail feathers. Again, he wanted to laugh as he picked his way across the clothes-riddled floor.</p><p>They didn’t cross paths like this because of fate.</p><p>From Regin in Amphitre, Yuta had heard of a certain fortress with not just the usual gold-laden tax chests, but a relic—nothing too dangerous or special except it was bound to attract thieves like flies. It had already snagged the two of them, obviously.</p><p>Apparently, the fortress’s lady had gained favor with a foreign lord and traded a song she had composed for a particularly old, charmed, and multifaceted gemstone, jammed into a copper pin for her tresses. The story went that she hadn’t a clue, which would explain how Jaehyun managed to bed her, though Yuta had been under the impression she was married.</p><p>It made sense either way—sexual attraction was no respecter of covenants, and Jaehyun was…something else.</p><p>Indeed, as Yuta circled the four-poster bed to spy her pin among all the discarded garments, he could garner quite a vision of Jaehyun’s slow strokes and glistening back around his Avian appendages. He was scarred, not kindly, around the circle of his hip, a sullen pink in the dying light of the sun being shunted out by the lower lip of the window. Yuta was close now, a rhythm of skin and feathers, rustling sheets, high and resonant moans, and Jaehyun’s bereaved, irritated breaths filling Yuta’s mind. </p><p>Jaehyun’s wings hugged her closer as Yuta skimmed up to the bedside table, scrolled with cream paint mimicking the cruelty of ivory. The pin sat in a stripe of a burnished, lasting glow, digging under the heavy belt Jaehyun had discarded.</p><p>Yuta reached for it, delicate, watching the shiver of Jaehyun’s anger as he bent over the lady and seemingly nipped her breasts, wings still stretched and shrouding. </p><p>Personally, Yuta was not beyond rubbing salt in any wounds. Gently, as he secured the pin in his own braided and knotted hair, he caressed Jaehyun’s glossy, neat pinions.</p><p>If Jaehyun lifted his wings, Yuta might very likely be seen—that would naturally put Yuta in danger. The other consequence was that it would destroy the sensitive equilibrium Jaehyun had likely crafted to get up here in this silken bed nestled up between two thighs the gorgeous color of wood varnish. Pride came in many shades, and just because Yuta would manage to pillage Jaehyun’s hard-earned loot before the lady fell asleep didn’t mean Jaehyun’s position wasn’t worth defending with self-respect.</p><p>Thus, Jaehyun only flinched at the touch, effectively driving hard into the lady, cutting out her full-bodied moan, and transforming it into a pitchy whimper. The room smelled of summer, sex, the trumpet vine blooms, and a terribly unique smell from Jaehyun, undoubtedly. Preen oil for his sweet carrion feathers, and Yuta couldn’t even be embarrassed that he knew it. Jaehyun, however, seemed mortified by the entire affair if Yuta could trust the peek of his flushed ears behind his coverts.</p><p>Soft and stiff, the feathers against Yuta’s fingertips shuddered away from him, and he was left quickly picking his way to the back of the room for the drawers and box, searching for anything of interest while Jaehyun was still preoccupied in getting the lady to climax—though it was very possible she’d already orgasmed once. The smell in the room suggested it, and Yuta had never gotten the impression that Jaehyun didn’t know precisely what he was doing when he leaned into his eros.</p><p>The second Yuta pulled open one of the oak drawers, the wood grated, alarming given the wealth suggested by the rest of the room. Jaehyun, ever clever, suddenly stuttered out a moan, and embarrassingly, the lady harmonized with him. When Yuta looked over his shoulder, Jaehyun’s ears had turned a nearly bruising red. Yuta had to clench down on a laugh that nearly defeated him.</p><p>Bless Jaehyun’s perfectionist pride.</p><p>Carefully this time, Yuta lifted the drawer with his fingertips as he pulled it out, slow, accepting of the patience required of him. Jaehyun’s lovemaking was his backdrop, his little symphony that he was positive he might be haunted by later.</p><p>As Yuta shuffled through clothing and personal effects with hands not meant to be touching such beautiful things, he tried to recall the last time he’d seen Jaehyun. Had it been a year? Only months? With a bandaged thigh in a colorful court, wine draining into tabletop cracks and delicate cloth weaves, his wings wrapped in crimson twine like all courts required of Avia. He’d been dripping somehow, underneath the light and among the semi-sonorous cacophony of music and constant conversation. Yuta could swear Jaehyun dripped gold among silver.</p><p>He hadn’t been able to speak with him—it would have clashed with whatever facades they had constructed. Besides, they weren’t terribly cordial to one another whenever they did communicate. The artifacts and things of interest they pursued too-often overlapped for anything but the most begrudging of recognition. Jaehyun had stolen the object of Yuta’s attention before, just as Yuta was doing to Jaehyun now. All was fair in love and larceny.</p><p>In the third drawer under a cobalt silk was a bare, brass bagh nakh, nicking the edge of his fingertip, and he would have startled at the sudden pain if he didn’t just as badly want to make sure they both got out of this without much more struggle. The bagh nakh cradled a bag that shifted like it was carrying silver when he pressed his touch to its cloth.</p><p>Sucking his bleeding finger into his mouth, Yuta lifted the bag from its drawer just as the lady made the sound of release. Yuta witnessed the tension in Jaehyun’s visible back muscles and the way his trapeziuses wrinkled as he drew his shoulders together, sliding out of her carefully with no evidence of his own undoing. Yuta wondered if he should be giving Jaehyun the respect of not looking at his glistening package hanging between his legs, just visible beyond the angle of his tail, as he lifted the bagh nakh, too, from the silks. Then again, though, he’d already seen it, slick and stiff nested in wiry black.</p><p>He had the space of five strides and not much time at all with Jaehyun’s shivering plumage stroking the sheets, arousal ruddy, mouth lowered to suck on the skin of the lady’s neck so she’d look away from the wide-open window. Either she would fall asleep coming down from two consecutive climaxes, or she would disrupt the general equilibrium by remaining awake when there were no more shaking bed frames to hide Yuta’s rummaging and more careless tread.</p><p>Light on his feet, he left the last drawer open, unable to close it silently, and returned to the windowsill. He hooked his new weapon onto his belt by the forefinger loop and bit the leather drawstrings of the money pouch between his teeth.</p><p>He knew he shouldn’t look as he turned on the sill, but he did—saw the flash of rose tongue and the exhausted definition of Jaehyun’s biceps as his arms continued to hold him, the gloss of his nearest wing relaxed to trace his primaries on the flagstones, his nose buried in thick curls. Jaehyun raised his mouth to suck on her earlobe, properly ignoring that Yuta was voyeur and witness, and all Yuta managed to do was abort an unbidden shiver. The summer heat burned at his back, and this image burning at his front as thin threads of Jaehyun’s black hair skated the plane of his smooth cheekbone, a line of sweat glinting across his jaw.</p><p>Yuta lowered and swung himself over the ledge, his taxed muscles already starting to shake, with the pin in his hair, the bagh nakh in his belt, a pouch between his teeth, and just Jaehyun dripping gold and sweat in the curved recesses of Yuta’s skull.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Thank you, Appia, for reading over for me and making sure I'm not touting pretty nonsense.</p><p>Also! Bagh nakhs! If you're curious, this one is fashioned with both the claws and the knife.</p><p>
  <a href="https://twitter.com/speckledsolana">twitter</a>
  <br/>
  <a href="https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1">curiouscat</a>
  <br/>
</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. I've Felt Your Raging Pulse</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>By the time he was three feet from the base of the tower, Yuta simply let go and suffered the impact against the balls of his feet. He narrowly avoided falling among the tangles of vine, legs and arms searing with exhaustion and jaw aching from clamping down on the pouch drawstring. He knuckled the junction of stress in his face, using his sore fingers to straighten his clothes and wrap his grip securely around the pouch. It would make too much noise looped into his belt, so he’d just have to run the risk of having the money out where he could keep it from jangling. The most he could do was unbuckle his strapped cloak and let it fall over the right side of his body in clover green folds.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Two of his fingers, one hurt from the climb and the other cut by the bagh nakh straight through his calluses, throbbed with the beat of his heart as he shook himself out and walked away from the fortress tower. He traversed the empty buffer space between the closest building and the fortress with the confidence he’d earned over nineteen years—sliding through war camps with his hair down at twenty-four, strolling away from the inn that had housed the thief he’d stolen back from at fifteen, fingering the pin in his braided hair at thirty-four.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The surrounding sprawl was much less foreign on foot and falling into darkness. Thefts made in silence and shadow, against fortresses badly designed, checked by his longtime-acquaintance of similarly dishonest aptitudes, rarely raised alarms. So long as he got out of the entire area quickly, he’d never get caught.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As lamps were lit in the ashen light, Yuta’s priority was getting out of the sky’s view. If he were Jaehyun, he wouldn’t dare leave until the lady was asleep, but that could be achieved anytime within the next few minutes given the fact that it had undoubtedly taken an ass amount of time descending the tower.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was the worst part—the descent. He had a greater fear of falling than he did heights, and though Jaehyun wasn’t rumored to be brutal, Yuta didn’t think it unlikely he could be picked up easily and dropped from a lethal distance. He’d half expected to see Jaehyun peek his head out and mock him at his agonizingly slow, human way of getting around before throwing a knife from the window aimed for his eye socket.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Prinks was an oversized town—very nearly a district—that developed from the inside out, then from the west to the east side, becoming gradually more sophisticated with every step in that direction—the fortress straddled that breach, and it was a gamble for Yuta to step into the eastern sector if only because if Jaehyun </span>
  <em>
    <span>did </span>
  </em>
  <span>seek him out, they both ran the risk of townspeople alerting the fortress peacekeep. He crossed into the east side nonetheless. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Around his brisk steps were people beginning to disappear from the streets, the worn stone pavement blushing a polished facade up at the manifesting moon. Flora too shy for the sun were beginning to unfurl in organized gardens, sills, and beds, and he could hear insects start to voice their troubles. The heat was dulling slowly, mulling away from the cooling stone town. From the steps of one house, a townsperson shook out their rug while a child shrieked about bathtime from inside the fire-lit interior. On the other side of the narrow walkway Yuta had encroached upon, a neighbor gave a throaty laugh at them in good humor as the rug-beater rolled their eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It felt uncannily like being back in Isdril, but seeing people out and living always did—always called back a stress and pain in his chest that he would never be able to fully shake.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He began walking faster, hugging the edges of the street and trying to abandon the still-active populace, and only breathed easier when he reached a stretch of dark houses, not an open shop or flame-lit window in sight. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>With his hand cramping around the silver in his grip, Yuta raised his free wrist, taking the wooden beads of his bracelet between his teeth. The whole world opened up to his ears once again and he didn’t even have a breath to process the sound of massive wings beating scars into the air before he had to lunge to the right.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Buffeted by an aggressive fold of wind, Yuta’s shoulder slammed into the stone corner of the nearest home, shucking a dull pain across his shoulder blade for the single moment he could afford to feel it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Unfurled and ruffled, Jaehyun stole his breath away from him, the sleek black of his feathers glinting crossly in the meek candlelight. He had his clothes on, never one to suggest he skipped decorum, though he looked like someone had tried to rub him one in a broom closet with the wrinkles and untucked state of his cream shirt. “You’re quiet,” Yuta said just short of a wheeze as he curled his one open hand around the corner of the house, heavy earth under the heel of his boot—for someone so large, Yuta would have bet on the air ripping under coal pinions.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun edged the corner of his mouth into a mockery, head tilting, disarrayed hair slipping with the motion across his brow. Yuta witnessed the dig of a dimple in his cheek and wished to know if Avia were the intersection of angels. “You weren’t,” said Jaehyun, and a thrill of being taunted rushed through Yuta.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, but you covered for me so nicely,” Yuta said, calculating how fast he could turn to the alley between houses—if the angle would protect him until he could get out of the open streets and somewhere less wide to the yawning sky. Jaehyun had found him. There was no escaping that. He hadn’t done anything fast enough to get to an inn or secluded area and hide, all of the streets too broad and the narrow ones too short, the terrain against him. His greatest concern wasn’t the tension he’d caused and the inevitable snapping, however, but getting caught, looted, and thrown in prison.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>That was more complicated than he was willing to risk, and just because the houses seemed to be sleeping didn’t mean they weren’t likely to wake.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s annoyed smirk turned into a grimace, ears flaring pink again. In the moment Jaehyun opened his mouth, flanked picturesquely by buildings and moonlight, Yuta dove into the narrow alley behind him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He should have expected it from an Avia. He tasted magic in the air before it even hit him between the shoulders, punching him forward and forcing him to fold over himself to avoid slamming into the uneven pavement. Tucking his head, he rolled over the same aching shoulder and only managed to regain his feet from the momentum of the blast alone. Pain lanced up his right leg from the naked perpendicular blade of the bagh nakh cutting past the fabric of his trousers and into his skin, and in the midst of breaking into a sprint, he shoved the bag of money down his shirt, tore the weapon from his belt, and fit its brass over his knuckles.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The pavement quickly devolved into gravel spinning out from under the soles of his boots, and he met the space behind this strip of houses—the bare gardens, the fencework, the silent threat of the open, twinkling sky above him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As he took to the left without stopping, he gathered his cloak and whipped it around his neck twice. The back garden paths curved under the open air toward a cramped opening, a stone well sitting in the caved circle of assembled buildings and structures.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta skidded on the gravel in his haste to change directions, sliding so harshly he took a splinter up the flesh of his palm by reaching for a rough-hewn garden fence to steady. A leaf of a vegetable plant grazed his cheek. He felt a harsh change of the wind. His knuckles throbbed with how harshly he held onto a weapon that wasn’t fitted to him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He dove for the town well’s little stone glade—the meager three feet of room surrounding it that would hardly let Jaehyun spread one wing, and those were the best chances he could have, all things considered.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was a fool’s game to play with Avia. Their pneumatized limbs didn’t make them any more fragile or less powerful. He’d been knocked out by one opening their wings before, and even if he managed to handle their feathers, he still had their magic to handle.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta planted his feet on the crumbling herringbone stonework and looked up, left hand wrapping around his sheathed rondel at his right hip, coming to terms with the necessary adjustments he’d have to make in his fighting style to stop both weapons from clashing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was one last thought Yuta had before narrowing in on Jaehyun’s nearly soundless landing on the shingled roof of the house straight ahead. How much damage was he willing to inflict? Because a human didn’t win in fights against Avia without throwing inhibitions out the window. But perhaps, just perhaps, if Jaehyun hadn’t come in with his feet aimed to collapse Yuta’s ribcage, they wouldn’t fight at all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He met the glint of Jaehyun’s eyes and grinned. “Was there not anything else for you to steal? Did I get everything worth taking?” he asked the air between them, still quiet, still unwilling to risk much noise if he could help it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Without the lamps, the moon was too wan to decipher Jaehyun’s expression. “Oh, no,” Jaehyun said, and his voice, though chilly, was still incredibly warm, “there were a few things.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“A little envy, then?” Yuta suggested.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s hand gestured out with a badly-veiled layer of sass and annoyance. “You ran,” he pointed out, balanced perfect on the roof with his great wings folded. With a bafflingly graceful step off the roof, pinions peeking out with a flinch of a moment for equilibrium, Jaehyun was on the ground and so, so much closer. “You think it’s a little envy?” The way Jaehyun’s cheekbones framed his eyes, even in shadow, was downright artistic.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh,” said Yuta with no weight and certainly no belief, “was I wrong to think you’d be out for my blood? Or did you just want to see how nice I looked with your pin in my h—hah.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’d had a few weapons pressed to various locations on his body, but this blade, so sudden and cold, pressed right up against his carotid, was something special. It was a dirk, really, beautifully embellished on its steel with white scrawls. Jaehyun held it above and under the folds of Yuta’s cloak artfully, like it was familiar—like it was his, the strapped hip holster Yuta could now see clearly a simple, dark sheath.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta could only laugh and edge very gently away from its thin kiss. Jaehyun exhaled through his nose, but did not pursue the inch of retreat Yuta took.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“If you can get it from me, I’ll let you have it,” Yuta said, reaching over his head to locate the bulb of a black jewel nestled in his braid.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Thieves killing other thieves wasn’t terribly unusual—less competition on the market meant more loot to steal, but Yuta wasn’t in the craft for greed. He would have made more money, more flattering fame, more luxury for himself back in Isdril. Of course, his purpose was under no illusion that this profession was a game. He had scars just as bad as the one on Jaehyun’s hip.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But certainly, least of all was he concerned with keeping the hairpin.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You may as well just give it to me,” Jaehyun said. His dirk was still raised, still pointed, still beautiful.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta shook his head and unsheathed his rondel, flexing his other hand to adjust the bagh nakh. He’d need to get it fixed for himself. It made his knuckles ache.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You know you’re injured,” said Jaehyun before tucking his wings in further and leveling his dagger. And, well, Yuta had forgotten, actually, and now his leg stung.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He felt like rolling his eyes was a serviceable dismissal. “This should be easy for you, then. Come and get it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s left heel shifted back, and Yuta leaned away on instinct, rewarded by a visible swipe of Jaehyun’s weapon and utterly entranced by the silver line the dirk sliced through the air. He wanted to compliment it, but there wasn’t room to breathe. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He moved with muscle memory for the time being, meeting Jaehyun’s dirk with only his rondel. A test swipe at his waist, his chin, his navel—nothing more than getting a feel for each other with Jaehyun rightfully confident Yuta wouldn’t run, and Yuta feeling confident that Jaehyun probably wasn’t intent on killing him. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun was right-handed, so Yuta led a half moon around him counter-clockwise, not daring to back himself up against a wall. One of the stone bricks wobbled under his heel when he slid Jaehyun’s blade away from his chest, Jaehyun undoubtedly checking which areas were awkward for Yuta to defend. Yuta did very little attacking of his own, getting used to the way Jaehyun’s arm twisted, the curve of his elbow, the way he didn’t keep eye-contact as his thumb pushed up against the guard of his dirk. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Things changed when Yuta circled far enough around to feel the yawning waft of cold air from the well they shared this space with. Where Jaehyun had kept to the center, only turning, he now moved, shifting his weight, right leg coming forward to allow him to cross his dirk from the prior attack at Yuta’s left shoulder to his opposite hip.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Inhaling, Yuta met the cut by jolting his left arm across his body and parrying with his rondel. With his exhale, he finally brought up his right elbow and sliced his bagh nakh’s blade in a diagonal arc worthy of the near-contact it would have made with Jaehyun’s collar bones. Jaehun sucked in a breath and took only a half step back, adjusting his grip and immediately cutting upward to catch Yuta’s right bicep.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta twisted, again seeing the point cut through the air, again so distinct in its embellished flourish that he could almost taste steel. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>His eyes strayed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He buckled when the magic hit him, lungs collapsing for a moment under the force and the barest taste of copper. Yuta felt, as he bent and saw the spinning stonework, the way his braid shifted. There was no way to cut down—only up, and Jaehyun would pull away with the pin in his left hand. The one he’d used to cast such simple magic, that up close packed such a punch.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta dropped his rondel, reached up blindly, grabbed Jaehyun’s wrist with his fingers, and swung up with the outer blade of his bagh nakh.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The meeting of metal tremored in his ears. The point of Jaehyun’s dirk trembled right below Yuta’s eye, the blade protecting the thin skin of Jaehyun’s wrist from Yuta’s bagh nakh but leaving the whole of his outer forearm and chest open to Yuta’s whim. Dirks didn’t have the quillons necessary to stop him. Past the steel that threatened to take his eye, he could see the rise and fall of Jaehyun’s chest.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta released a shaky breath, looking up at the knots of wrists and blades, steel, flesh, brass.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s pulse beat heavily in the vice of Yuta’s grip.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Alright,” said Jaehyun, quiet, timbre of his voice warm but his execution tense. “Alright, what does the pin mean to you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The inscribed steel of Jaehyun’s dirk reflected the gold of Yuta’s polished brass mixed with moonlight, skin pale. What words he could make out were Ienkran. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It had a history. Jaehyun’s accent was inscrutable—he sounded like he was from Syltris if anywhere, not Ienkra, and certainly not Avira, though no Avia seen outside of the mountains ever did sound like their motherland. Since the war, no one traded with Ienkra so openly. It was a filthy thing to do.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta’s rondel was Syltrin, charmed by a Syltrin witchsmith rivaling the talent of the one he left back in Isdril.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He had a few, very reasonable answers and a singular unreasonable one.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s something you want,” Yuta said. “Why do you want it?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The weight of silence ached against the pressure of holding a threat of injury working against him. He’d favored his right with the bagh nakh for strength to make up for any clumsiness, but it was still deeply uncomfortable against his knuckles and grip. His bones grated and whined, and his climb-weary arm was seconds from trembling. The cuts in his fingertips throbbed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“This pin wasn’t the lord’s to gift,” said Jaehyun.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Personal?” Yuta asked, trying not to gasp through the tension. The point of Jaehyun’s dirk had slid just enough to meet the skin of Yuta’s cheekbone, and he fought against the urge to wince and close his eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nothing is,” said Jaehyun. “It’s just money.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta could taste all the lifelong foolishness he’d ever had on his tongue when he spoke. “Bring me along and I won’t take your heart or a single coin.” He was thirty-four, restless, uneasy, discontent.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I can’t trust you,” Jaehyun said, and Yuta wished he could see his face. “That’s ludicrous.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Trust me,” Yuta said. “If I was living for the money I would have stayed a blacksmith.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The breath Jaehyun let out was audible, hissed between the narrow space between lips and teeth.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Very carefully, very slowly, Jaehyun let go of the hairpin.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta pulled away, dropping both arms and straightening his stress-taut back. He touched his cheekbone with his naked hand and pulled away with smudge of blood on his fingertip.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s dark eyes stared at him in the moonlight and the cold wash of the town well’s maw. “It’s going to be boring.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Still wary, Yuta stepped away and eased himself into a crouch to gather his rondel. “Thievery’s not a game,” Yuta said, “but it’s rarely boring.” In fact, he’d bet a grand many things that nothing, let alone thievery, would be boring with Jaehyun factored in—nothing had been yet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun said nothing, sheathing his dirk in tandem with Yuta’s rondel, closing the secrets of its floral language away from sight. Finally, Yuta wanted to laugh, for he really wouldn’t have ever had the imagination to conjure up the situation he’d put himself in now.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you going to try to steal the pin while I’m sleeping?” Yuta asked, suppressing that urge to laugh and instead scrutinizing Jaehyun’s expression across the way. He was starting to feel every ache and pain and exhilaration all at once, but he wouldn’t be collapsing on the pavement anytime soon.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t think so,” Jaehyun said, and for a thief, that was good enough.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
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<a name="section0003"><h2>3. My Blade, Warm at Your Thigh</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is more of a bridge chapter, but there's plenty of ground to cover within it. Feel free to ask any questions you may have!</p><p>cw: mentions of war, death, trauma</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I don’t think so” was a decent enough answer from a thief for Yuta to know that he had a chance, but not that Jaehyun was trustworthy. No, that was ignorance, idiocy, naïveté. They did not sleep in the same quarters, the same block, or the same building.</p><p>Jaehyun took Yuta’s rondel and Yuta took Jaehyun’s pin (he could admit to the right being Jaehyun’s), named a place and time, and parted. The rondel was Jaehyun’s assurance if only because while Jaehyun listed off several possibilities to ensure that Yuta wouldn’t make off with the pin, the dagger was the only option that made Yuta hesitate.</p><p>It was an astute and fair negotiation—they were both anxious. Realistically, the rondel did not equate in worth, but it was more beautiful and more useful than the pin, and Yuta was nothing if not a troublingly obsessive lover of blades.</p><p>He watched the skies as he walked gingerly to an inn of no convenience or consequence—Jaehyun had mobility Yuta didn’t have, and he really, truly didn’t want Jaehyun to find him in his sleep. Thus, he rested in a two-story, square building with flower beds practically coughing up solidago. For a pinch of silver, he was given alcohol for the cuts in his thigh that had smeared blood down his leg and turned his colorless hairs the hue of dark rust. He nearly forgot his cheekbone, but the private wince he gave to his own ministrations reminded him.</p><p>More scars, perhaps, depending on how he would heal—all surface and barely concerning, but still promising possibility among the dozens upon dozens of others that marred his skin.</p><p>Peeled out of his pants with alcohol stinging in his nose and cuts, he felt disgusting. He felt tired. His arms felt removed from him as he lowered himself onto the bed, cloak his pillow as the shy moon leaked moth dust onto the floors through the glass window.</p><p>Sleep was uneasy in rooms with windows looking out into the world. As opposed to being able to see another exit, he felt trapped under the glare of moonlight.</p><p>Between the ages of twenty-seven and twenty-nine, he had deliberately chosen to sleep in rooms without windows, because if there were any, he would unfailingly lie paralyzed every time he could feel the moonlight on his eyelids. Every time under pale darkness, the sky would split in half and bleed.</p><p>In this room, there was a window.</p><p>Yuta closed his eyes and choked on the moment he could hear the child crying about bath time, the laughter of the neighbor, the wanton sighs of the fortress’s lady. Even Jaehyun, folding his wings in the chase for sleep. He could feel the life around him like each person was pressing a single fingertip to his throat and breathing through their lips for him to hear.</p><p>In the climax of all that sound, all that breathing and life, everything in his brain cut out with a whistle, and Yuta clenched his teeth until the gasps coming out of his nose subsided and his muscles gave up.</p>
<hr/><p>At nineteen, the night sky ripped like wet silk. A white and lilac V started at the horizon and sighed against black space and crowded stars, whistling as it yawned nearer. Yuta watched it from the open window of his house on the small hill, a coincidental witness to the streak of magic and stone—a falling star, except expelled from the border like a flying kiss.</p><p>He stood, palms and wrists rigid against the worn wood of the sill, and gasped as the projectile expelled a sonorous scream. </p><p>It hit like an earthquake.</p><p>Isdril shattered, a gourd dropped from a watchtower without ever leaving the ground, spreading in chunks and shrapnel and slamming out a ripple of dust. The world seemed to collapse and fold, the homes bending, the streets whipping out and rippling like ribbon.</p><p>Screams were a symphony crescendoing into horror and fear. His home wobbled. He heard his sister trip down the stairs, yelling for him, as he stood transfixed at the window.</p><p>The second onslaught was immediate, but quieter if only because the chaos and terror was too loud. His home broke into pools of wood and glass and metal as the walls caved in backwards under rubble, as he tasted magic like blood in his mouth, as he heard the crunch of bone and sighs of death and couldn’t find the voice to scream.</p><p>The third, the fourth, the fifth impacts were not devastating any longer, as there was nothing more to truly devastate, but they hit Isdril and the earth nonetheless, and the town crumpled under the weight of war’s opening message.</p><p><em> We’re here, </em> war whispered, hummed, bellowed. <em> Sleep well. </em></p><p>He took five boulders  to his life at the age of nineteen—straight from catapults on the borders of Ienkra. A dislocated shoulder and broken leg, fire turning the sky purple with the mud of smoke, screams and sobbing and silence and five boulders.</p><p>They would weigh on his legs, his arms, his chest for the rest of his life, no matter how short that life might be.</p>
<hr/><p>As the bottom of the sun slipped free from the horizon, the road was sweating with dew, the night hardly cool or dry enough to keep condensation from seeping out of every crevice. The grasses weeped with it and the trees dropped water like crystals in the pale sun.</p><p>“Good morning,” Yuta suggested as Jaehyun met him on the path. The Avia’s wings were folded and he was on foot, leading a lightly-packed horse to match Yuta’s own. So long as people could witness them, Avia were forced to use conventional transportation. Public spaces, roads, daylight all condemned them.</p><p>People treated Avia like they were material to shun—like if they looked too closely at their wings and magic-tainted fingertips, the framework of the world would quiver apart. </p><p>It could. </p><p>Certainly, recognizing that there was a potential apex predator that wasn’t just plain old humans would be ruinous.</p><p>With Yuta’s rondel strapped to the opposite hip from his own dirk, Jaehyun raked his hair back, grimaced, and spared no greeting in return. His wings were unlaced but still neatly tucked against his back, framing his head and reflecting a stunning and subtle green from the sun. They dwarfed the impact of his clothing choices—the loose and long sleeves, the fitted waist of his riding pants, and his dipping necklace slipped down the neck of his shirt with who knew what at the end of it.</p><p>It was a charm to see Jaehyun mount his roan. His wings tilted and whisked just barely out to lift, seat, and balance him on the saddle, but that small noise of his feathers was just about the only sound he made for the next hour along the road. The sun melted through the sky and shone on his oiled hair and reticent face, and Yuta was in good humor—entertained, so to speak, by the situation.</p><p>The early morning brought tradespeople by the road, carrying and trundling and generally moving in the opposite direction Jaehyun and Yuta were headed. They’d started out early enough to not be caught up in any traders from Prinks traveling to any outer region. It was just the two of them on their horses, wading through an influx.</p><p>Jaehyun drew their eyes. It was as if his wings were crimson and peacocked with how many people stared. Children climbed over folded sheets in the back of a cart to keep him in sight for longer. One man slowed and very nearly started walking in their direction until he slipped on the stone edging of the path and flushed the shade of a poppy. One young girl had downright pointed at him with a loud declaration of his race as if there were a single person who didn’t have their eyes on him.</p><p>Never once did Jaehyun acknowledge the downright rubbernecking the tradespeople did—he didn’t sit up any straighter or twitch or look them in the face, and Yuta didn’t wonder how he managed to navigate the courts so well.</p><p>They cut off the main road when the sunlight was no longer cool and white, Yuta following Jaehyun’s silence. There was shade at the angle of this path, the trees narrowing and hugging the road, but still wide enough for Yuta to ride parallel. It was only then—when he felt a semblance of privacy—that Yuta asked, “What’s your source?”</p><p>Unlike with the people who stared, Jaehyun looked at Yuta when he spoke, even if he looked back at the road immediately. “If you know to ask, you must know the answer,” he said with only a few seconds of hesitation, the first words a little ashy around the edges before he found his voice, the morning still crusted around his vowels.</p><p>Yuta let out a breath, not disappointed by Jaehyun’s cageyness. “Legs?”</p><p>Jaehyun shifted on his horse, adjusting his position, and it was like Yuta was seeing a statue shake off marble dust. When he resettled, he was less rigid and his expression less carefully blank. “Thighs.”</p><p>As far as anyone knew, Avia were the only magic-bearing creatures in the world. Their land of Avira was far removed from anything or anyone, and any Avia who ventured outside the motherland found themselves in sparse company.</p><p>Because of that rarity, Yuta knew only as much as his Avia smith partner had told him back in Isdril at the tail end the war. He hadn’t made it a mission to ask any and all witchsmiths or court Avia what the secrets of their race were.</p><p>In any case, according to Isdril’s witchsmith—and Jaehyun’s answer confirmed this—Avia sourced their magic from certain energy groups in their bodies. Wherever their source was located generally determined the nature of their magic: the neck and head were manipulative, the chest and belly spatial, the legs blunt power, and the arms emotional.</p><p>Given the way Jaehyun had toppled Yuta from a distance just the night before, the legs were a pretty solid and evidently correct guess. Yuta’s body remembered the impact very well.</p><p>“How are your injuries?” Jaehyun asked. As if he’d been privy to Yuta’s recollection. And Yuta had to sit there for a moment, physically restraining himself from staring at Jaehyun and grappling with feeling distinctly thrown-off. The dun mare underneath him clopped along, the birds socialized, and Yuta ran the rein in his grip through his fingers.</p><p>It wasn’t that Yuta had had any expectation that Jaehyun was heartless, but it seemed so odd to be asked that question in particular by the exact person who had been the cause of his nicked-up, bruised state.</p><p>“I’m fine,” Yuta said. He was more sore than he was injured. “Thank you.”</p><p>Jaehyun accepted this with a nod, adjusting the loose cuffs of his sleeves, and Yuta pursued the only other question he needed answered for the moment, encouraged by the broken ice between them.</p><p>“Shouldn’t we be worried about being followed?”</p><p>For a second or more, Jaehyun’s only response was silence, but his bottom lip shifted like he was testing his teeth against the soft inner flesh of his mouth. Yuta’s attention to that detail brought Jaehyun’s eyes over, perhaps feeling the way he was being watched. He didn’t grace Yuta with more than a moment of eye-contact before looking back to the path, though, and Jaehyun’s wings adjusted with an air of reluctance.</p><p>“She knew what would happen if she invited me to her chambers,” Jaehyun finally said, and Yuta had to absorb that admission. It almost made him laugh—<em>almost </em> made him truly dig his heels into his horse and beg her to stop so he could catch his breath.</p><p>There was something truly stunning about the idea of Jaehyun being able to harness someone’s vices regardless of their distrust. Yuta had known, to an extent, how effective Jaehyun was, but he now had a moment—a truly condemning thought—of realizing how beautifully dangerous this man could be.</p><p>Yuta intended on holding his tongue, but Jaehyun was fidgeting with the reins, lips pressed thin, and the silence must have been making him uncomfortable.</p><p>“A good thing I didn’t ruin her expectations, then,” Yuta offered, barely curbing some messy emotion he didn’t know how to wrangle, and Jaehyun snorted, indelicate, but still charming, as the tension in his shoulders eased.</p><p>The silence resettled, giving way solely for the wildlife around them. Yuta tried to think less, but the company he held was fascinating on a level he’d anticipated but underestimated.</p><p>Regardless, only rarely did Yuta travel with anyone, but he found that the kind of silence Jaehyun asserted on his own terms was the palatable kind. Yuta hadn’t put any thought into his bargain, but he didn’t think he would have assumed that the man who’d held a knife to his eye less than half a day prior would be so quiet in daylight.</p>
<hr/><p>When they stopped at a creekside, Yuta prodded him along that train of thought. He watched as Jaehyun’s dimples flashed while stroking along his roan’s mane, considering the comment: “For someone forced into this—” At which point Yuta gestured between them and Jaehyun followed the motion with his eyes. “—you don’t seem to mind me being here.”</p><p>Jaehyun watched his mare drink from the creek, raising one hand to thumb at the pommel of the rondel at his hip. The light filtered through the trees in little gold medallions, spotting along Jaehyun’s skin and tilting his eyes into a softer brown.</p><p>“Should I be honest?” Jaehyun asked, eyes not straying from the sun-exposed creek bed, and Yuta bit his bottom lip around the urge to laugh.</p><p>“I think that’s ideal.”</p><p>The exhale Jaehyun gave through his nose sounded a hair away from a snort. His relative stillness disturbed all at once again as he lifted his hands and raked them through his hair, shaking the oiled strands forward in their soft, lit-up tint of green. He circled around his horse’s flank, smoothing back the momentary disarray as Yuta wondered just how untouchable Jaehyun was actually. “I need something from the Geran court,” Jaehyun said as he detached his waterskin from the saddle, “and I can’t get caught. If you can be useful, another set of hands will make my job easier.”</p><p>Yuta hadn’t known so many details about the pin to realize its source was Geran—that was a border city nestled right up against the Ienkran southwest. From southern Prinks to Geran, Yuta would be seeing some familiar sights. That entire stretch from southwest to east in Syltris was deeply familiar to him, and he wasn’t sure whether to consider this new information a curse or an opportunity.</p><p>In truth, he hadn’t haunted those southeastern lands in ages. Isdril, he was sure, would still be there, a few dozen miles north of Geran and standing proud with its rebuilt bones.</p><p>As for Geran itself, Yuta knew very little about its court, and every time he’d visited the city, he’d been a blacksmith and not a thief. Its streets had a blue tint to their iconic marble, and the ones with power were cold and sharp like hidden icicles. </p><p>“And if I get caught?” Yuta asked, leaning on his horse to pry his boot off. Its sgian-dubh had slipped.</p><p>He fixed it, but at the cost of Jaehyun eying him carefully. “How many weapons do you have on you?” he asked, neatly dodging Yuta’s question for his own concerns.</p><p>“How many do you have on <em> you?” </em> Yuta shot back. “Don’t tell me it’s just two.”</p><p>Jaehyun flushed up into his ears, and Yuta stared at the evidence the reaction provided. “I have one more,” Jaehyun said stiffly, taking the few steps back to the creek and rubbing the neck of his waterskin to activate the charmed filter. Yuta scanned over Jaehyun’s body as he refilled, trying to trace any hint of his third weapon.</p><p>“My rondel looks nice on you,” Yuta said after spying nothing new but given the opportunity to appreciate his own blade, smooth and beautiful under the balancing shroud of Jaehyun’s wing. The wicked pleasure he felt at seeing Jaehyun’s ears go from pink to scarlet was largely unmatched.</p><p>Met with a fizzly sort of stark silence as Jaehyun contented to suddenly ignore him, Yuta occupied himself with putting his boot back on and trying not to smile too deeply. Personally, he had one blade at the small of his back, the ones matched in both boots, his bagh nakh now leather-wrapped on his waist, and a shoulder sheath. Normally he’d have an arm wrap and almost certainly his rondel or some other blade on his hip, but the shirt he wore would have kept the former out in the open (which he didn’t prefer) and Jaehyun possessed the latter. </p><p>The more he saw it on Jaehyun’s hip, the more he keenly missed it. He was also simultaneously coming to acknowledge that having someone be in possession of his weapon of choice was something vaguely erotic.</p><p>What he was to do with this emotion, he wasn’t sure.</p><p>He had to be content with mulling it over in silence, since it wasn’t until sometime later, when they were both back in their saddles, that Jaehyun spoke again. His nose was tilted away from Yuta to deny him the pleasure of reading his expression. “You won’t get caught.”</p><p>It took Yuta a moment to parse the intended meaning. <em> Get caught doing what? </em>he almost asked, then skidded backwards through their conversation to the question Jaehyun had neatly dodged.</p><p>Knowing this was the answer, now, startled a laugh out of Yuta. He traced the line of Jaehyun’s jaw and pitied the thought that he couldn’t have left a mark on him last night. “Won’t I?” he asked, not trying to conceal his mirth; it wasn’t that he lacked confidence, but Jaehyun’s surety was almost shocking. “Has my reputation preceded me so liberally?”</p><p>All he received in response was a small ripple of chatter from the birds in the trees and a twitchy pinch from Jaehyun’s heels into his mare’s sides. It affected the pace minimally, but did put Yuta at a gentle disadvantage, Jaehyun’s profile slipping out of his view for a moment in favor of the crest of his wing.</p><p>“Jaehyun?” he pressed, amused and now intrigued beyond his willingness to hide it.</p><p>In response, Jaehyun passed him, putting himself firmly in front of Yuta and leaving him just his back to see. Yuta stared at the cream-embroidered cuts in Jaehyun’s shirt that made space for his wings as they rooted up from the gold of his back, the latch between his shoulder blades that would shrug off his shirt down past his waist, and the rondel resting on the rise and fall of his shifting hip.</p><p>Yuta had known of Jaehyun for years now—the reputation that preceded <em> him </em> was sensical: an Avia disposed toward the reckless unsavory paired with a physical aesthetic that served him rather than caused disdain.</p><p>There was an attraction toward ne’er-do-wells with handsome bodies and faces, and anyone with a nose for dangerous charm was inclined toward Jaehyun. That much alone was affirmed by the fact that they hadn’t had any guards sicced on them, traveling utterly uninterrupted. </p><p>Jaehyun’s savvy shouldn’t have thrown him. The thieves knew Jaehyun to be a social force with an inclination toward influence. <em> Allegedly, </em> the courts recognized Jaehyun as an attractive form of trouble—people <em> knew, </em> that is, that Jaehyun brought “bad luck,” but found that enticing. Then there were the common people, who very likely didn’t give a shit about an Avia apart from his novelty. Stare and point, gossip and chatter.</p><p>Yuta, on the other hand, was one among many. He had one identifying feature he could do little about—not consistently, anyway. He could clean up, brush down, fit into the middle class like he’d been born there (he had); in the courts, he only knew how to come off as an unwelcoming but wealthy merchant; and among the common people…</p><p>Reaching up, he ran the fingers of one hand up over his white braids, his scalp and every strand sorely in need of a wash for the oil and grease, but holding the black-bodied pin perfectly. He’d done a quick rag-clean that morning, but hadn’t touched his hair.</p><p>Back when he’d returned to Isdril—there to rebuild, repair, relive and see ghosts he’d wished he could forget—a child had stared and pointed, too, and asked him why he was so “old.”</p><p>“My parents forgot to color me in all the way,” he’d confessed, and the kid had gone right-near berserk over the possibility of dying his hair in order to complete him.</p><p>He’d done it once—dying it.</p><p>And hated it.</p><p>If Jaehyun had the constitution later, Yuta would like to ask if it was the hair. If his reputation preceded him because of his stripped melanin, or if word had gotten out that there was a war-torn ex-blacksmith with a knife fetish and restlessness that would kill him.</p><p>Someday, it would have to kill him.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Chapter 4 is already started! Hopefully the next update will come at a more reasonable pace.</p><p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. And What of the Scars?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The journey was going to be a long one. At one day down, they had about a fortnight left of riding, and if Yuta were any less practiced on a horse, he would have felt like stale cheese dipped in hellfire. Regardless, it had been a bit since he’d ridden a whole day’s worth of distance, and he could feel the ache in his thighs.</p><p>Worse was not the ache, though, but the distance they were from Monic, the next town over. Prinks wasn’t quite in the middle of nowhere, but it certainly wasn’t convenient, and when the day was up in terms of riding, they were still miles from town. If it were up to Yuta—if he hadn’t flung himself into this situation headlong—he’d be heading in the other direction entirely. But, alas, he lived life for the unpredictable and occasionally-unfortunate.</p><p>Yuta leaned on his horse’s flank, surrounded by dark-washed trees, and fiddled absently with the short hairs of her body as he gazed at Jaehyun.</p><p>“This is a predicament,” he mused, though sure that they both had been thinking the same thought for hours, now. “What’s your proposal?”</p><p>Jaehyun’s fingers curled around the underside of his horse’s saddle, hefting it with a certain devil-may-care and ease that made Yuta’s lungs flinch in a brief laugh. Despite the current situation, he was not that fussed.</p><p>“We could knock each other out at the exact same moment,” Jaehyun suggested, voice smooth and dark like it had been the night before, warmed by the faded daylight.</p><p>“I’d rather not risk the concussion,” Yuta said—reasonably, he figured.</p><p>Jaehyun’s own laugh came short from his nose. He, too, didn’t seem all that concerned as he smoothed his hands over his horse, but his back had been to Yuta for the past five minutes, so all Yuta had for a read was body language and the scaffold of his wings.</p><p>There was no light pollution in this clearing they’d chosen—just the moon and dying peach light—and Yuta could already see so much less. At least he had the single comfort of knowing Jaehyun couldn’t see any better. Avia were incredible, but they didn’t have everything.</p><p>Silence was the default for Jaehyun, Yuta was realizing. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it did make communication feel a bit like consistently failing to start a fire.</p><p>“We could sleep together,” Yuta said, and the flinch Jaehyun executed was dramatic, wings puffing out, then cringing inward, ears darkening to ripe plum as the darkness steadily bruised. Yuta lifted a hand to press to his mouth, biting his knuckle for a moment just to suppress his delight.</p><p>Jaehyun turned his head for him, just enough to look out of the corner of his eye and show its whites. “Aren’t we talking about the pin?” he said, words stiff, and Yuta couldn’t help the little seizure of laughter in his lungs.</p><p>“If we’re sleeping against each other,” Yuta began, and pursed his lips together as Jaehyun hid his face with his left wing and led the horse to tether, “I’ll be able to feel you move. I’m here for a journey, Jaehyun—” Yuta saw him stiffen as he looped the horse’s long reins around a low, sucker branch. “—not a chase.”</p><p>Jaehyun’s impeccable delivery of a disdainful glare almost gave Yuta a lung fracture. “Land forbid you’re forced to chase me,” said Jaehyun. Then, before Yuta could say anything cheeky or otherwise, he said, “I would prefer you not so close to me, what with your arsenal.”</p><p>Finally, Yuta saw Jaehyun face-front after what felt like hours of the Avia edging his vision—not that his face was very informative, but even in battle it was preferable to keep someone in full sight. He was faded in the dark and his arms were crossed from his three-meter distance, closed off.</p><p>“I can’t disarm you of your source,” Yuta rebutted, and he meant it full-well. As much as humor could take the edge off, he was not keen on the idea of being at the mercy of a full-magicked, winged predator. “If we’re close enough, you’ll be able to feel me draw one of my blades just as easily as I may feel you tug on my hair.”</p><p>Yuta saw the twitch of Jaehyun’s wingtip—he’d swear it. </p><p>He wanted to etch Jaehyun’s micro-expressions into his skull before he could even understand them.</p><p>A thousand potentials swam in the darkening pitch between them before Jaehyun finally said, “I will not be taking my clothes off.”</p><hr/><p>Neither of them did. They put out their bedrolls side by side, and—“I will have to lie atop you,” Jaehyun said stiffly because of his wings—a layer of blanket between them, and Yuta was situationally obligated to snake both arms under Jaehyun’s wings and hold him there, slanted, like an uncomfortable lover, while Jaehyun found a place for his palm over the strap of Yuta’s shoulder sheath.</p><p>Jaehyun was impossibly light—for a human, at least, which he wasn’t, which wasn’t a pleasant reminder when prone. </p><p>While settling, Jaehyun reached up, slow as someone chilled, and Yuta let him slide the pin out of his braid. The tip of the metal grazed Yuta’s cheek on the way down, and he almost closed his eyes on instinct. “Put it under your clothes against your thigh,” Jaehyun said, voice so near that Yuta could feel it against his chest.</p><p>Yuta took the pin, knocking fingers for one moment, and slid it to the outside of his leg. The metal was chilled against his bare skin from his warmth-absent hair.</p><p>Still with cold slowness, Jaehyun’s wings relaxed and fell, the right one shrouding over their bodies. He seemed to be trying not to breathe as he pressed his fingertips into the sweaty leather under Yuta’s shirt and over his skin. </p><p>So close, with Jaehyun’s face against his shoulder, Yuta could smell the preen oil in Jaehyun’s hair like he could in the air of the fortress.</p><p>He tilted his face back and away.</p><hr/><p>The biggest window was the sky, but it far more reminded Yuta of the aftermath. The broken ceiling. The silence.</p><p>When the edges of sleep were touching his lips, he tried to keep taking in the cooled summer air, slowly letting it out, in four-second increments, as silently as he could manage. </p><p>“Can you move your hand,” Yuta whispered even though hours must have passed already, “off my shoulder—” because he couldn’t breathe—</p><p>Jaehyun’s palm slid down, elbow nudging Yuta’s arm, and Yuta adjusted, trying not to shiver as Jaehyun’s touch fell past and under, hand coming to rest between Yuta’s bicep and his ribs. Jaehyun’s forearm rested perfectly against Yuta’s blade, there, but Yuta no longer felt like his fifteen-year-old injury was happening all over again, so it was irrelevant.</p><p>“Thank you,” he said, and Jaehyun did not respond.</p><hr/><p>He woke in the exact same position, his body having enacted a play of rigor mortis, and he felt a bit like death, too. His back strap dug into his spine like a reprimand while Jaehyun lifted himself out of his arms, the act that pulled him from a sleep so light it might as well have been a doze.</p><p>Despite Jaehyun having removed his hand the night before, Yuta’s shoulder ached, the second-day soreness hitting hard and doubling down on his sensitive joint. It wasn’t usually an issue unless he overexerted himself or the weather was changing too quickly.</p><p>He pressed a thumb into the edge of the strap under his shirt, watching as Jaehyun steadied himself on his arms.</p><p>“Good morning,” Yuta said to the sloppy mess that was Jaehyun’s hair and the lines on his cheek, the puffiness of his face and reluctant blinks—mitigated as the wonderment was by the harsh, intimidating black of his wings in the pallid light. </p><p>Jaehyun closed his eyes and exhaled before drawing up onto his knees and moving his hand to touch Yuta’s thigh.</p><p>The pin was still there.</p><p>They’d had plenty of time to kill each other.</p><hr/><p>Jaehyun simply wasn’t a morning person.</p><p>He got on his horse the same way he did last time, but with a lot less graceful care, and it was hours into cloudy daylight before he spoke.</p><p>“We’re sleeping on opposite sides of Monic,” he said, rusty and flaking.</p><p>Yuta, exhausted as he was, still made an effort. “I’ll miss your breath against my heart.”</p><p>Jaehyun, with all the smooth and effortless grace he’d been missing earlier, unsheathed Yuta’s rondel at his hip with a singing, flippant ease, and dangled it by two fingertips over the side farthest from Yuta as the horses plodded along.</p><p>Its charmed carbon steel glinted in the wan sunlight with a blue sheen, gorgeous as ever. </p><p>Yuta’s mouth curled into true and honest amusement. “Don’t,” he warned, warm, and Jaehyun kicked his horse and resheathed the rondel.</p><p>Yuta was becoming well-acquainted with the way Jaehyun’s wings folded against his back. He wondered, though, if his tail muscles got stiff with his feathers splayed up against the croup of the mare. Human ways and designs were neither made for Avia nor accommodating, but Yuta wasn’t sure he ought to feel culpable. Considering the laws, it was possible that Jaehyun always traveled by human means.</p><p>He wondered how often Jaehyun elected it safe to stretch his wings.</p><p>“What are the full terms of the arrangement you’re under?” Yuta asked, moving on from that thought, then added, “It’s going to rain soon.”</p><p>Shaking his smooth hair back, Jaehyun looked skyward, and Yuta took the opportunity to return to his side on the path—a constant, small chase. There wasn’t a patch of blue in the sky any longer, and the pathed forest was saturated with that odd, overcast vividity, but Yuta supplied, “Old injury,” before Jaehyun would need to ask. </p><p>Given the soreness in his shoulder, he was realizing that he needed to stretch it <em> now </em>and stop ruminating on natural phenomena such as joint pain and grumpy Avian men. He rolled it back gently, tilting his neck, and knuckled at the overcompensating muscles. He was sore all over, technically, but at least all of that was because of choices he made by his own power.</p><p>Jaehyun shuffled his wings and anchored his reins around one wrist as he reached over his opposite shoulder with his free hand. He rubbed the flats of his fingers against his ventral scapulars and came away with an oily sheen. “I return the pin to the Geran Court. That’s it. Those are the terms.”</p><p>“So stealing from the Geran Court is your own plan,” Yuta supposed. It wasn’t that Jaehyun hadn’t made that fairly evident when he said it in the first place, but dealing with slippery thieves was a game of precision. Yuta would know, since he was one.</p><p>He watched Jaehyun thread through his hair with delicate, waxy fingers, fixing the strands back in perfect order—waterproofing, perhaps, against the rain, though Yuta didn’t know why he wouldn’t be doing the same for his feathers at the moment.</p><p>After a pause, Jaehyun conceded detail. “I’m exchanging the pin for information, but I have reason to believe they will tell me as little truth as they see fit.” This statement retracted Jaehyun’s earlier lie of “It’s just money.” It wasn’t money at all—or at least the important payment wasn’t in gold.</p><p> “And they have records?” asked Yuta. That would be where he would come in, he supposed, granted Jaehyun’s hopefully sufficient knowledge that Yuta did <em> not </em> specialize in wheedling information out of reticent people in a short period of time. Case in point: Jaehyun.</p><p>“Ideally,” said Jaehyun, and dropped his hand to reclaim the rein in both once more. “I’ve never had the opportunity to search as thoroughly as I would like.”</p><p>Yuta stared forward and said nothing, deliberately and carefully holding his tongue. “Never” was a generous admission. “Never” meant that Jaehyun had a history and that Yuta had somewhat-accidentally spliced himself into it. He wasn’t someone to balk at something deeper—he’d known he was deliberately sticking his nose where it didn’t originally belong—but there was a sobering thrill to his whims catching up with reality.</p><p>What he was to do with the information he had gleaned was dubious. His ill-will was woefully lacking against Jaehyun so far, which was a gift of the fascinating. Besides, his knowledge on Geran was still limited, and any information he had once known hadn’t seemed important enough to file away for his long-term memory. He <em> did </em> know that the entire southeastern border had been tried by the war, and Geran had not been spared—though, like many cities and towns, had since rebuilt and recovered.</p><p>“That’s my job, then?” Yuta said after a time. “Should I know what I’ll be looking for?”</p><p>Jaehyun’s smooth jaw pulsed with a single moment of tension. “Any information from the start of the war with Ienkra.”</p><p>A drop of rain hit Yuta’s cheek, and he flinched, casting a glance upward compulsively even as it was a confirmation of his own…his own…“W—”</p><p>Yuta recalled the Ienkran engravings on the blade of Jaehyun’s dirk, and the belated unease he should have had all along finally hit him.</p><p>He bit down on his tongue so hard he winced, and then he stopped letting anything register on his face entirely. “Got it,” he said and let his thoughts run deep.</p><p>Jaehyun shifted on his horse, and like pulling on the edges of his sleeves created a divine catalyst, the heavens opened up and poured.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Thank you for your patience ;; ♡ I'm getting back into the swing of things with my current longfics.</p><p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Were You to Destroy Me</h2></a>
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    <p>Jaehyun had Yuta ride ahead of him for the first time, and it was only the knowledge that Jaehyun hadn’t killed him last night that allowed him to just <em> do </em>it. There were neither tarps nor pit stops—they just had to go and keep going at a clip until their mares’ hooves hit Monic.</p><p>What was going to be a significant portion of their day riding became something they accomplished before it was long past midday if the snatches of white sunlight through briefly-thinning clouds was anything to judge by.</p><p>Yuta was…well. “Soaked” was a sufficient word when said objectively, but greatly failed to paint the bigger picture, which included rashes and wrinkles and a stench of two hours that—if Yuta didn’t have a vivid recollection—rivaled that of the dead.</p><p>The leather of his saddle and packs, at least, was waterproof, but he was not.</p><p>He wiped his nose on his sodden sleeve, and the rain continued to sob down on them even with flagstones underfoot, water running through the paved divots. His fingers were stiff with cold as he slicked his loosened hair back, pin long relocated to the bundles of his cloak in his saddle.</p><p>Welcome or not, he’d taken the impromptu rinse, and Jaehyun had as well—which explained why he hadn’t made an attempt to preen his wings and perhaps why Yuta had been stuck in the front. Of course he wouldn’t be allowed to watch Jaehyun take an opportunistic birdbath, but he’d still been privileged enough to steal cursory glances of vague paranoia.</p><p>Shivering, Yuta started in the direction the town watch had pointed them in, now leading his horse on foot and bearing the agony of leakage in his boots. </p><p>Monic was less verdant than Prinks, made up more of stone and metal than stone and wood. As a result, it was colder within its bounds than it had been on the muddy forest trail, and the people who were out and about were few and far between, dashing between doors or under overhangs.</p><p>Still, one resident managed to stop and stare at Jaehyun’s dripping carrion wings.</p><p>Jaehyun was silent. Would remain silent, most likely, given that Monic was a small town<em>ship </em> more than a town, and according to the guard, they only had a singular place available for accommodation. Yuta was sure, though, that if they didn’t have each other to worry about, they wouldn’t have to rely on the local hospice.</p><p>“I don’t trust you enough to sleep in diff—” </p><p>“Understood,” Jaehyun said, blunt as Yuta raised his hand to knock on the hospice door. Yuta cast a glance at his rigid companion and the way he was a different man every hour.</p><p>His hair, aside from some disarray, was smooth and intact even as his clothes clung to his body just as Yuta’s did. There was an arm strap visible, now, around Jaehyun’s left bicep along with cuts of muscle and a nomadic leanness. His face was tinged with pink from the wet chill, nose and cheeks and lips bitten blush, eyelashes dark and prickly. His wings were ruffled.</p><p>A man standing in a rainstorm ought not look beautiful.</p><p>Yuta knocked.</p><hr/><p>It was an odd thing to have Jaehyun out of his sight for the first extended period of time in over twenty-four hours, but he could endure the skin-crawling sensation if only because he needed this bath like his shoulder knife needed a whetstone (he’d intended on doing that as soon as possible but had distraction to blame).</p><p>Every cuticle and nail he cleaned established a more secure ease at the back of his brain, and he raked out some thirty dead, tangled hairs from his aching scalp. It would continue to ache for some time before it recovered from the protest against the pull and grime, and he had half a mind to cut it all off just to save him the pain.</p><p>He’d made it a habit after the war to not let his body build up a veritable mire, but he’d slipped up without full intention due to a sequence of negligence and unplanned vulnerability.</p><p>They were trading—Jaehyun was eating while Yuta expunged his filth with a bran bag from his kit and soap from the hospice that smelled the smallest bit nicer than the wax that formed it, faintly reminiscent of citron and honey.</p><p>In the corner of the room farthest from the door was the bag he’d brought in from the hospice stable, pin and valuables secure. The rain still pounded on the roof overhead, leaking down the high window that hugged the edge of the ceiling. Their bathroom was modest and utilitarian along with the rest of the building, and further prompted Yuta to <em> not </em>take his time in the cooling water.</p><p>He spilled himself out, aching, and tipped the tub over with a grunt before reaching for the filled water bucket and standing over the floor’s burbling drain.</p><p>The sudsy residue ran off his body in the thrashing quiet, and he dried his sun-stained scars and hair until he was damp at best.</p><p>His head was clearer, but not in a pleasant way. This particular mindscape was familiar.</p><hr/><p>“I don’t need the tub,” Yuta heard Jaehyun say quietly to the owner of the hospice, a pale, to-the-point woman not unlike her entire township. Yuta earned a skittering gaze from the Avia as he passed for the hospice’s small dining space. </p><p>It lingered too long.</p><p>When one of the hospice workers passed him a bowl of hot stew, he waited until they returned to the kitchen to slide out the thin, tiny silver rod from the inner lining of his saddle bag and let it sit in the liquid for a time as he detangled his locks.</p><p>He had half a mind to fish around for his beads to overhear the rest of Jaehyun’s conversation with the hospice owner, but he was bone-tired, and the other half of his mind wanted to set his face down on the tabletop and diminish from his mortal coil.</p><p>Though only accounting for a small portion of chemical reactions, the silver needle did not tarnish; he removed it, wiped it down, and began to eat.</p><p>He braided his hair between fast bites of soggy stew and tried to organize the given details:</p><p>The pin had been given to the fortress’s lady by a foreign lord, whose past ownership had been apparently unwarranted. Implications suggested that the pin had originally been owned by the Geran court in some fashion—or at least was asserting a right to ownership from some degree of morality. Jaehyun was tasked to obtain and return it in exchange for information regarding the start of the war, and Yuta had no idea from which angle Jaehyun was approaching that history.</p><p>The war had been over for five years, but Ienkra was not a subdued threat taken lightly.</p><p>The magic they’d employed on their side of the border had been well-established, but it wasn’t as if Syltris didn’t use their own Avia. It wasn’t as if a blade couldn’t be a trophy of war.</p><p>But Yuta couldn’t know for sure.</p><p>At the same time, Yuta would hope Geran wouldn’t commune with an Ienkran sympathizer, not that Jaehyun wasn’t likely cunning enough to deceive them.</p><p>The only reason Yuta didn’t feel necessarily lied to was because he had no expectations of Jaehyun telling the truth in the first place—he could only assume Jaehyun expected nothing more of him.</p><p>Yuta finished his braid with a flick of water, the droplets hitting the aged wooden tabletop as his hair slid between his shoulder blades and he took the pin from his bag. He wiggled it into his strands until it felt secure then refocused on the last bites of his stew.</p><p>He wasn’t looking forward to seeing the room they would share and inevitably finding it housing a window.</p><hr/><p>Last time he managed to snag a room without one, he slept in a basement, which this region of Syltris very reasonably didn’t often have. Yuta gave the warped, curtainless glass a cursory glance, half-tempted to ask for his rondel back to cut into the stone and use his sgian-dubhs as nails for draping his cloak.</p><p>If it weren’t considered rude to modify a hostel’s generosity for his own peculiarities, he would have.</p><p>Jaehyun had switched outfits like Yuta had, but he was still in plainclothes, the cotton folds fresh as he dropped the clothing washtub the hostel had given them in the corner of the simple bedroom. Yuta set one of the metal water buckets down, then tossed Jaehyun the hospice soap without warning him.</p><p>He heard Jaehyun catch it, but was already taking out his leather conditioner and slipping onto the mattress prepared against the far wall of the room.</p><p>Jaehyun’s coordination wasn’t a shock, but him initiating a conversation within the next few seconds was. “You never said what you wanted the pin for,” Jaehyun said, crouched with his back to the center of the room as he poured water into the washtub. His suspenders were more visible with his darker trousers and worn shirt, criss-crossing to accommodate his tail feathers and wings.</p><p>“You’re going to have to believe I was being your average thief with that pin,” Yuta said plainly, unsheathing his <em> bi su </em>from his shoulder sheath and laying the leather across his knee. Jaehyun whipped around to the sound of steel, plumage startled, and Yuta raised his eyebrows. “I’m cleaning my leather. Drying my blades. Gotta do it.”</p><p>“Right now?” Jaehyun asked, expression tight.</p><p>“You can turn around,” Yuta suggested. “You’re the one with your back to the center of the room.”</p><p>For a moment, Yuta thought Jaehyun was going to accept that risk, but then Jaehyun stood and used his hostel-slippered feet to nudge the bin farther from the wall.</p><p>The Avia did not say another word.</p><hr/><p>The rain let up for a small portion of time, which Yuta was keen on seizing for the purchase of a waterproofed outer garment of <em> some </em> kind—he’d sacrificed his old one months ago and it was clearly biting him in the ass now. Oiled silk was a high bar, but unwaxed split leather was apparently not, which suited him better anyway.</p><p>“Not you?” Yuta asked Jaehyun, who was forced to accompany but didn’t seem all too harassed about it. The cattle rancher accepted Yuta’s coin without a single nosy word and passed over the middle-weight folds. They’d informed him that he’d have to haul ass in his sandals to the other side of Monic to get wax before the rain started up again and, in the same breath, told him that there wasn’t a single blacksmith in the area for miles (which was idiotic and inane—he should have had it done in Prinks where there was a sustained guard).</p><p>“My wings can be sufficient,” Jaehyun said as they stepped away from the home, and Yuta hadn’t meant to manhandle him into saying something racially distinctive. </p><p>“Of course,” he tried to amend. He <em> knew </em> what that looked like—he shouldn’t have asked at all. Isdril’s witchsmith would do it, cloaking herself with her dappled starling wings and no respect for her face, which bore the weather.</p><p>Jaehyun, predictably, did not respond.</p><p>Neither did he respond when, one significant walk later, the beekeeper said under no uncertain terms, “The crow isn’t welcome.” He only stepped farther away from the façade of the building, folding his arms and standing with perfect posture, expression placid.</p><p>“He’s an Avia,” Yuta retorted, “or should I call you an ape?”</p><p>The beekeeper balked, startled by Yuta’s bite, and before their eyes could darken, Yuta continued with a wide smile, “I just need wax for waterproofing. I’ll be in and out before you can be a jackass all over again.”</p><p>They stepped back for the jangle of silver he gave, still startled with the part of their lips and flinched-open eyes, and he found their display shelves within the first five steps, shuffling through the items. He kept his ear tilted toward where the beekeeper stood and assessed their stock—candles, conditioner, soaps, balms, then finally sufficient blocks of wax.</p><p>“I don’t ap—”</p><p>“I’ll take this, thanks,” Yuta said, lifting two blocks and slipping them into the sling he’d made of the leather he’d purchased before fiddling through his money. He kept it to the left side of his body, right side angled, and dropped his right hand as soon as he could pass over the silver amount the beekeeper numbly mumbled.</p><p>Yuta waited until they were far out of sight of the apiary before holding his right hand out for Jaehyun.</p><p>Jaehyun did a vague double-take, snorted, then took the bar of soap from Yuta’s palm, holding it up to his nose. After a moment, he shook his head with a little tilt. “My sense of smell isn’t great.”</p><p>“Clove,” Yuta said. “Doesn’t matter. It smells good.” Jaehyun flipped it over between his deft fingers for a moment before pocketing it in his bag without, as usual, another word.</p><hr/><p>Jaehyun sat far from the fire while Yuta worked over the beeswax and leather, scrubbing it in with a rag and fresh sweat. Yuta kept him in his periphery for the sake of his risen paranoia alone, regardless of the fact that all Jaehyun was doing was idly preening his feathers whilst balancing a book borrowed from the meager hospice shelves.</p><p>The hospice was not dead—it milled, and there were sick the workers were devoted to, though according to the owner, Jaehyun and he were the only current travelers. Yuta could faintly catch the sound and smell of another meal being prepared.</p><p>“Read to me?” Yuta suggested when the room was empty for a time and he’d worked his first layer through half of the leather.</p><p>“No,” said Jaehyun, and Yuta breathed a laugh over the drapery across his knees. He brushed a trickle of sweat off his face before it hit the unwaxed side and rolled back his right shoulder. His left was still tender, though as his non-dominant, the work would have been slower anyway.</p><p>He swore to himself he wouldn’t forfeit a cloak like this again—he could tolerate being more encumbered, couldn’t he?</p><p>He doubled down, determined to finish before night fell or his arm unwound into a puddle, and bit his tongue once again over questions he wouldn’t dare ask where they could be overheard.</p><hr/><p>Even alone, the questions required a tact that made diction difficult, especially when he had to protect his own privacy.</p><p>“What is there to look for in Geran concerning the war?” Yuta asked as he slid the door shut and tossed the near-supple folds of leather to his corner of the room—done looking at it, feeling it, smelling it. To hell with leather for the time being. “What am I looking <em> for?” </em>he rephrased, though he hoped the over-elaboration made Jaehyun less inclined to give him a repeat answer as Yuta reached that corner and lowered his other belongings to the floor.</p><p>Jaehyun dropped his own bag and carefully stretched out his wings, one after the other. There wasn’t enough room in the space they were given, but there was a tweak in his expression that suggested he would take what he could get. Yuta watched, just short of breathless, even though he shouldn’t have been doing that at all. In the fading twilight, Jaehyun’s feathers were dull, but they were tidier, now, aligned and neat.</p><p>After an inhale, Yuta looked away and dropped to a crouch to gather his arm wrap—he’d skip his back sheath this time for the mercy of his spine, but couldn’t excuse reducing his count. His peace of mind wouldn’t allow it regardless of with whom he shared his bed.</p><p>Given how Jaehyun had reacted to his <em> bi su, </em> he resisted the urge to take out the little blade and enjoy the wootz steel <em> . </em> Instead, he rolled back his left sleeve in silence and listened to the subtle shift of Avia feathers and muscle.</p><p>He almost forgot he’d asked a question.</p><p>“Geran was one of the retaliatory focal points for Syltris. It remained initially intact at the onset of the war,” Jaehyun said, and Yuta didn’t know how his voice got like that at night, but he rather wished Jaehyun talked more. “One of their targets makes less sense than the others—of the name Ker. My interest in knowing why is personal.”</p><p>Yuta shook his sleeve down and gazed at his bags and leather in silence with only his periphery keeping Jaehyun in view. He didn’t know a place called “Ker”—he was never deep enough on their side of the border to hit a city, neither did he know a scrap of their language. He could parse an accent from just the way they flicked their tongues, but he was in the dark about this.</p><p>Carefully, Yuta let his next question fall from his lips: “Are you Ienkran?”</p><p>“No,” Jaehyun said—no hesitation, no undue slowness—and pulled the mattress farther from the wall. “My race is Avia. Nothing more.”</p><p>If Jaehyun were telling the truth, the exclusion would be fascinating, but there was no way for Yuta to know for sure. How he could ever know for sure with Jaehyun was going to be an enduring mystery. He knew that much.</p><p>Yuta stood, moved over, then tugged the top blanket from the mattress as Jaehyun waited, seemingly relaxed though no less structured. </p><p>He wished he could take the blindfold from his bag and use it for this night, but it was give or take one vulnerability for the other, and he cared more for his safety than he did his emotional health. That was in the pits anyway.</p><p>Lowering himself to the mattress, he lay back, slipped the pin from his braid and tucked it under his waistband, tugged a smile out from deep within his throat where his humor remained, and opened his arms. In the wan light, he caught the way Jaehyun’s eyes narrowed, but nonetheless he caved.</p><p>It was all an uglier repeat of the night prior, the window glaring in the corner of Yuta’s eye as he adjusted his hold around the small of Jaehyun’s back, knuckles grazed by the flats of Jaehyun’s feathers.</p><p>Jaehyun settled his forearm against Yuta’s sheath, rested his head, hip to hip as they made room on the narrow mattress, and Yuta closed his eyes as the anxiety began to climb.</p><p>As light as Jaehyun was, his weight made it worse.</p><p>Yuta tilted his head back and controlled his breath, wrangling his subconscious away from the window and the way its light tinged the underside of his eyelids. He focused on feathers and preening oil and the snort he’d earned by the hand of petty thievery.</p><p>And it rolled over him anyway.</p><p>He felt Jaehyun lift his head in the midst of purple light spilling through the warped bedroom glass, Yuta’s throat working, the phantom pain in Yuta’s leg shuddering with Jaehyun pressed up against him. Yuta opened his eyes in the midst of the recall and witnessed Jaehyun’s steady gaze, softened by the dark but still acute.</p><p>Yuta wasn’t sure what his tells had been—how Jaehyun figured it out unless it was the cast of his eyes and his right-side tension—but Jaehyun lifted himself up and lowered back down higher across Yuta’s body, tilted his left wing, and shrouded the window from view.</p><p>Jaehyun’s arm cradled his head, bicep under his chin, and all Yuta could see was black. Yuta flexed the arm trapped under Jaehyun, exhale heavy and pinched, and Jaehyun breathed, “Can you sleep on your side?”</p><p>“Thank you,” Yuta said, though he swore he almost choked it, and there was no part of him that knew what to do than accept the offer, shifting with Jaehyun until Yuta was nearly tucked into him, one arm tossed over his lower back between his tail and lower feathers and his fingers curled into one suspender under his shirt. His skin was cool, but warm the longer they remained like that.</p><p>With his right hand held steady at the dip of Jaehyun’s waist, Jaehyun’s left arm fit snug under Yuta’s neck. Slowly, the muscles of Jaehyun’s right arm softened around Yuta’s head, fingertips resting at his crown as they spoke nothing of the position of their legs.</p><p>It was all oily musk and darkness and the significant awareness that Jaehyun could snap his neck.</p><p>And yet he slept.</p><hr/><p>Jaehyun’s wing had slipped down in the night, a dash of blanched, drizzle-sodden light hitting Yuta’s eyes and giving him a morning call before the stiffness of his body tried to tell him to go fuck himself. His right arm was numb and his back felt downright ossified, but Jaehyun, slightly above him, was serene. Expression smooth, complexion damn impeccable.</p><p>Like Yuta’s smallest movement back to get a better look was an alarm bell, Jaehyun came to with a sharp inhale through his nose, blinking his slim, tired eyes open. Yuta lifted his hand to tap the smooth curve of Jaehyun’s bicep, and whatever clouds were behind Jaehyun’s empty gaze parted. He lifted his arm, slid his right leg back, and like a ritual started, checked Yuta’s thigh.</p><p>Pin confirmed, Yuta leaned out of Jaehyun’s hold and wings with a tight, voiceless groan. As soon as he had his right hand free, he suffered through the pain of his blood cells crashing awake. Jaehyun hissed, and Yuta watched the wince of discomfort as he corrected the angle of his neck and fumbled his way off the mattress.</p><p>“Good morning,” Yuta mumbled, and, this time, Jaehyun nodded thoughtlessly, shaking his hands through his hair as he sat on his knees and rustled his wings. Any other words were caught at the back of Yuta’s throat. </p><p>They collected their things and paid the hospice for breakfast and the clothes they dried by the fire, took no longer in the township than to purchase their next rations, then left.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Note: <em>Bi su</em> only refers to the Korean cultural name for “hidden knife” (the direct translation is simply “dagger”). The reason I opt to use cultural monikers rather than continually refer to each of Yuta’s weapons as “blade,” “knife,” or “dagger” is because it gives a bit of a more detailed picture and theoretically reduces the time it would take to painstakingly describe some of the weapons when they’re based off an existing design (take the bagh nakh, for example). <em>Bi su</em> knives don’t necessarily have a particular design—resources detailing such things in South Korean history are slim pickings—but I wanted to keep with the pattern of naming the blades via the cultures they’re nodding to.<br/>I’m not attempting to imply that Scotland exists in Wist’s universe by using sgian-dubhs. Neither am I implying the existence of Korea by using <em>bi su,</em> though I do use background East Asian influences in this universe where I can. I’ve waffled on editing/retconning and neutralizing the monikers, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of research in Wist where I get to learn about existing weapons and unique designs.<br/>Regardless, I thought I would explain the anachronisms—I am simply being a gratuitous nerd. Forgive me for dragging you along.<br/>If you’d like me to explain some of the jargon I drop such as “wootz” in the author’s notes from now on, let me know.</p><p>Thank you to twt user <a href="https://twitter.com/kittykooks">kittykooks</a> for testing yujae’s sleeping position for me.</p><p>
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  <a href="https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1">curiouscat</a>
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        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. You Have Blood on Your Cheek</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>With this chapter, I'm introducing the "graphic violence" archive warning. I wasn't sure when I started this fic whether I would need to or not, so I apologize for the insufficient preparation. I'm not sure if it's extremely graphic, but it is enough that I would rather err on the side of caution. It's all subjective anyway.</p><p>Please check the additional tags if you are sensitive to violence! I've elaborated there.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><em> “THIEF,” </em> came Ienkran from split-bloody lips, squaring up to his face, ashy hand a steel grip around his hand as the blakas cleaver came down without a single flash of polished iron, rusted and unclean, its cloth grip fraying under callus-crusted fingers.</p><p><em> THIEF </em> echoed through his head in the moment he swiped for his eared dagger, pushed his thumb between the protrusions, and heard the grace of a punctured liver and a spittled scream against his hollowed cheeks.</p><p>The cleaver nicked his outer wrist. The hand gripping him tried to crush his fingers, pinching on twenty-three years of malnourished strength.</p><p>He shucked out the dagger, twisting it sideways, hearing the drum of shoes on water-sloppy earth and smelling the rank pressure of a gagging, maddened breath that was spoiled death and over-boiled vegetables.</p><p>The blade slid higher between foreign ribs with an uncomfortable friction, another twist, his grasp now bloody and slick.</p><p>He pushed against a chest losing breath, thinner than his free palm expected, and the pain-hardened grip yanked him sideways, the edge of the blakas scraping a streak up his forearm.</p><p>Reaching for the dagger, he yanked it out and judged within microseconds the poise with which a lung collapsed, then sliced at the hand holding him as a torch swung into view and cast his head out of shadow. The one body fell away, bubbling up and rattling as it sank down.</p><p><em> “THIEF,” </em>rang a narrow voice with a flick and a rumble.</p><p>There was blood on his feet and eyes tilted up to the stars, Ienkran, glassy, and dead.</p><p>He wrenched the blakas loose and threw, freeing a sizzling arc of crimson lit by firelight as a chest caved under the cleaver’s weight.</p><p><em> “THIEF,” </em>screamed the camp of rain and fresh blood and the keys to a prison in tacky hands as he fled.</p><p>“Yuta.”</p><p>He gasped, the sun cracking through his headache and shoving him from sleep.</p><p><em> Fuck, </em> he wanted to say, but checked his hair instead, fingertips touching the midday-warmed jewel. “I didn’t realize you knew my name,” Yuta mumbled through mangled bearings. The forest was sparser but no less dense outside of Monic, a couple of hours into parted clouds and a couple more into this leg of the journey, assuming he hadn’t been out long. The heat had gotten to him and wrangled his sleep-deprivation into false security.</p><p>“You know mine,” Jaehyun said. He was ahead of Yuta, not an inch of his expression to be seen, and his tone was immutable.</p><p>“You’re not treated with discretion,” Yuta replied, “and you’re not easy to forget.”</p><p>He could effortlessly name the Avia in southeastern Syltris and a handful throughout—the farther from central Syltris one journeyed, the more rare a sight Avia were, though nearly every court made it a priority to obtain one in some capacity. If they weren’t useful, they were trophies.</p><p>Jaehyun, an undisguised wanderer, was an anomaly at best.</p><p>It wasn’t just the wings, though.</p><p>When Jaehyun failed to respond, Yuta switched angles in order to know why Jaehyun would wake him—it wasn’t nearly as superficial a concern as he wanted it to be. “Was I talking in my sleep?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>Yuta stared at the steel clasp between Jaehyun’s wings, the fabric unembroidered and loose. He could see where the feathers grew sparse into his skin, smaller and gentler. Higher, around his neck, was the back of his delicate-chain necklace, exposed by the slack neckline. “Then was there something you needed to say?” Yuta pressed, a lick of frustration morphing his grogginess into agitation.</p><p>His question did not favor words this time. Jaehyun simply shook his head, but left it slightly tilted.</p><p>The path was narrow, there was no way to ride side-by-side, and Yuta needed to relax. He needed to breathe.</p><p>Jaehyun turned suddenly and Yuta reared back, yanking on his reins. His free hand slipped for his back knife, breath rising in his chest, but Jaehyun was frozen. The Avia’s eyes flicked through the wild trunks at their left, staring deep into the daylight mottled by the forest canopy, his head turned at an angle to give his left ear access.</p><p>Yuta’s heart steadied.</p><p>With much less urgency, Yuta unsheathed his knife as quietly as he could while the horses idled. He studied the watchful stiffness of Jaehyun’s face.</p><p>“How far?” Yuta breathed, and Jaehyun twitched out of his trance, looking at Yuta for the first time in hours with a blink hooding an intense distraction.</p><p>“Not,” Jaehyun said, turning further so Yuta had his full expression, where cogs were shifting rapidly in his eyes. “Not far.”</p><p>It wasn’t easy to travel at a clip on the path they were on—it was dangerous for the horses, but the horses were probably the target.</p><p>As someone who traveled alone more often than not, Yuta was familiar with the threat of robbers.</p><p>A smattering of his scars were from bandits looking for anything of worth or benefit. Even the safest of paved roads were at risk, and the path they were on was neither safe nor paved. Apparently they weren’t quite as much in the middle of nowhere as would have rendered the event unlikely, either.</p><p>Jaehyun ran an idle hand through the plumage of his left wing, visibly pausing, then dismounted. Without looking him in the face, Jaehyun unbuckled Yuta’s rondel from his hip and unlatched his closest saddle bag.</p><p>Yuta was astonished for a single moment prior to using his brain. </p><p>It wasn’t vulnerability he was seeing—especially when Jaehyun slipped the chain necklace off from under his shirt and, with a flick of a charm being activated, lashed it to the saddlebag in a lock. It lengthened and looped around the leather like the thinnest of animated snakes, then tightened, contents secure.</p><p>It was just as much a guarantee that Jaehyun wouldn’t vanish as it was to ensure that Yuta would protect the horses. </p><p>At least Yuta knew the significance of Jaehyun’s necklace, now.</p><p>Jaehyun, acting quickly, passed to the other side of his horse with a rigid look in Yuta’s direction, then drew a belt from the uncharmed saddlebag. This, two fingers thick and a supple leather, he looped around the small of his waist between his wings and tail. It tamped down the loose flow of his shirt, snug up against his muscled waist and the suspenders he untucked his shirt to tighten with fast fingers. “There are two of them very close to here, and a handful of others further out,” Jaehyun said. “I’ll take the back.”</p><p>Then, with a cock of his head and the dig of one dimple, he said with that same tinge of pettiness he’d exhibited the night Yuta stole from him, “You’ll manage without me?”</p><p>“Fuck off,” Yuta laughed, startled, then recoiled from the violent wind of Jaehyun’s take-off. The taste of magic in the air for the extra power made his mind spin uncomfortably as the damp leaves on the path wafted, disturbed. Then he had his head back on his shoulders and squinted up at Jaehyun disappearing beyond the upper canopy.</p><p>Not sparing a moment to adjust to having him gone, Yuta resheathed his back knife and kicked his horse forward to gather the reins of Jaehyun’s mare. She’d shied off the path from the ripple of magic, uneasy without a rider to steady her, but if Yuta couldn’t orient himself in the current atmosphere, she’d be a lot more than uneasy in a few minutes.</p><p>Dismounting, he ducked between the horses’ heads and stepped ahead of them, testing the ache in his thighs, wrapping the reins around his left wrist and palm, and shaking his bracelet farther down his right wrist. “Okay,” he breathed once, then clamped his teeth around his bracelet’s wooden beads as he led the horses forward.</p><p>It took him a moment to locate anything unusual—even with magically-enhanced hearing, he still didn’t have the acuity Jaehyun did. While not surprising, it was a little dreadful. Jaehyun really was a terror.</p><p><em> “—ipped th——res,” </em>said an edged, low voice close enough that Yuta’s shoulders tensed involuntarily while he tried to parse the direction of two pairs of leaf-disturbing strides. He needed to get slightly ahead of their location so if the horses ran, they would escape away from the bandits.</p><p>Carefully, Yuta dropped the beads from his mouth and wiped his lips, easing into a light jog to tug the horses along and get his heart warmed up while he was at it.</p><p>Two bandits was something Yuta could handle. If thirty-four years didn’t prove anything, it certainly leant him a valuable assurance.</p><p>He wished he could use his bagh nakh or his rondel, but he’d have to make do with his other weapons and whatever the bandits supplied him. His knuckles had only just recovered from being sore. </p><p>He checked over himself, wearing all but his shoulder sheath to spare the residue pain in his left shoulder. He’d be favoring his sore-from-waxing right, but he’d endured worse.</p><p>Given his <em> bi su </em>was his most significant blade with his rondel absent, he paused to pull it from his saddle bag. It was a knife, not a dagger, but it had more length than any of his other weapons and tools did and had a sharp enough tip to stab.</p><p>Yuta spared one glance for Jaehyun’s necklace-wrapped saddlebag and properly resented the arm he was missing for the first time.</p><p>He’d live.</p><p>Or maybe he wouldn’t.</p><p>He’d know in a moment.</p><p>Letting go of the reins, he slapped the horses into a trot to continue beyond him. He then slipped off the path, beads between his teeth and his <em> bi su </em> ready, and settled behind a tree with his right foot turned out just over the tangle of soggy undergrowth.</p><p>He counted the bandits’ steps, trying to parse their weight and how he might compare. One sounded assuredly heavier than him. After nearly fifteen years of a vagabond lifestyle—with only two years of reprieve—he’d never been able to keep on any weight.</p><p>They split from each other, and Yuta closed his eyes against an inhale and the subtle press of a stale dowsing charm as it found him—like sour salted meat and ripped-up sod. He could hear the breath of wrought iron, the heavier, settling tread of a boot.</p><p>For the sake of keeping the horses, he had to move quickly.</p><p>He exhaled, engaged, and swung out.</p><p>Masculine, young, stocky, wielding a bangkung<em> . </em></p><p>Yuta stepped back just in time as his opponent attacked. The bangkung was longer, single-edged, slightly convex, wooden hilt, dark with neglect, not beautiful but lovely nonetheless. They were holding it badly.</p><p>With little more than an extra inhale, Yuta slid into the passing sweep of their attack, twitched his grip on the <em> bi su, </em>and brought his elbow across the edge of their solid face.</p><p>He caught their nose, which was enough. They stumbled back, eyes widening in pain and panic as blood soiled one nostril. Their free hand came up to guard the wrong side of their head, thumb slipping on their hilt as they floundered their blade inward, and Yuta straightened his arm before they could reorient, sinking his knife straight into their neck.</p><p>They choked and gave a broken gasp, going rigid with shock and blanching straight out of their youth.</p><p>They would live for up to twenty minutes, but they didn’t know that, probably.</p><p>They’d likely never been stabbed in the neck before.</p><p>Yuta left the <em> bi su </em> in just to avoid the splatter, bringing his freed hand down instead to grab the meat of their sword-bearing thumb and drive his knee up on the underside of their wrist.</p><p>They gurgled in tears and dawning pain, and dropped their sword. Its clatter was dull in the leaves and dirt.</p><p>“May death treat you more kindly than I have,” Yuta mumbled, placing his hand on the left side of their face as the sob of their breath and eyes stained his palm. He stepped to the right, gripped his <em> bi su </em> by the handle with his left, and yanked it laterally.</p><p>He picked up the bangkung before the earth even had a chance to soak up their blood.</p><p>Pulse kicking up, the ground was uneven with buried roots and rocks as he sprinted, demanding half his attention to avoid what would be a truly unfortunate twisted ankle. He held both his <em> bi su </em>and the bangkung in his right hand to wipe the blood off his left, his tendons tingling with the feeling of resistance he’d gotten against their cartilage.</p><p>He should have sharpened his <em> bi su </em>in Prinks when he had the chance.</p><p>But also, running was a terrible way to avoid getting a sword in the gut.</p><p>The very moment he saw the whisk of a horse tail, he tossed the bangkung into his right grip and switched directions straight for the knot of trees to his right.</p><p>And nearly slammed right into the second bandit.</p><p>He pitched back just fast enough to miss the point of a startled blade and a yell. The breath of his own surprise jolted a laugh out of him as he darted onto the path again and tested the weight of the bangkung in his hand.</p><p>This bandit—the lighter one—was even younger, but they held their blade better. It was straight rather than convex, but still the same design. Still only with one edge.</p><p>Their dark eyes witnessed the blood on his hand, and they swung.</p><p>Their stance was less square and harder to slip into, so Yuta didn’t even try. He brought up his own bangkung and parried hard, watching their back foot dig into the earth. Their breath tightened in their chest as their blade rebounded and they took their dominant leg back, shuffling immediately into a thrust. Yuta blocked and twisted away, turning into the blunt area of their range, but they darted back before he could get his <em> bi su </em> into their extended elbow.</p><p>He shifted his grip as they did the same, their eyes scanning over his body as he stood easy. </p><p>When they swung, it was looser this time and clumsy. He again twisted to the side of their sword, not even bothering to raise his bangkung, and they skidded back like a frightened animal, breath upticking with a skittish gaze.</p><p>He smiled at them and, with a shudder, they attacked again. They favored their bladed angle this time in order to turn faster when he invaded their weak side. They rebounded from his parry and immediately swung back in, trying to catch his exposed waist.</p><p>When he parried this, too, they contorted down and away from him to barely escape his <em> bi su </em>as he cut it inward.</p><p>He did not wait. He moved with them as they tried to shy away and brought the bangkung down instead on the narrow expanse of their back. They only avoided the majority of it by hitting the dirt, digging their sword into the shallow topsoil for leverage and yanking themselves out of his range with a cry.</p><p>They stumbled around face-front to hide their injury from him, trembling a swear through their lips as they strained their arm to reach for the cut. Blinking through a familiar haze of pain and adrenaline he could see in their eyes, they tripped back the moment he took a step forward, barely parried his swing coming in at their dominant side, and then gasped when their blades slid and Yuta got right into the notch between the metal and their hilt.</p><p>He pushed, and they stumbled, and as soon as they cast a glance to their own step, trying not to fall over themselves, Yuta ripped his knife across their exposed arm.</p><p>They let go of their sword with a cry, then a scream from donning an ugly sash of blood across their chest. Finally, they took the heavy wooden pommel of their dead partner’s sword to their temple. They toppled to the ground like a stone puppet.</p><p>Yuta left their weapon if only to prioritize the horses, which were not politely idling in the corner of his vision, but were now some distance ahead again. Out of concern alone, he jogged to catch up with them, holding back his comedown of adrenaline until he was reasonably sure he was out of troubled waters.</p><p>The horses were, at least, alone as he caught up with them, plodding as they were with calm, animal sangfroid. “So magic gets to you, but swords don’t,” he mused, snagging his horse’s reins and shoving his <em> bi su </em> into one of the saddlebags. He patted his way up the other horse’s body to tug back on her lead. “What are you? Retired war horses?”</p><p>He was kidding, mostly, as he pulled them to a stop, mouth always a little loose when he had blood in his cuticles. Once again, he shook his bracelet down, put the beads between his teeth, and listened. He buried his hearing beyond the massive thrum of their equine hearts, listening for anything near and remotely suspicious—a breath, a footstep, a tree settling with the weight of someone leaning into its support.</p><p>Nothing.</p><p>He wiped his mouth on his shoulder this time, not trusting his hands, and pulled the horses back down the way they came as the blood on his bangkung cooled. When they reached the nearest body, he wiped it on their clothes before balancing it in his saddle to wipe his <em> bi su </em> down as well.</p><p>Then, he finally searched their body. Flint, leather cord, a chunk of badly-whittled wood in an animal form he couldn’t recognize for the clumsy craftsmanship. He didn’t look at it for longer than necessary, sweeping it from his mind. He took the cord and their blade after dragging their body off the path, grabbed the bangkung from his saddle, and continued back to the first body.</p><p>The charmed ring he found was so old and worn it left a stained color around the body’s middle finger. He left everything on the carcass—including the ring, not bothering with something that sizzled against his touch in ways that made his stomach turn. Rolling them, too, off the path, he almost let himself breathe.</p><p>One last time, he used his bracelet to listen. When he heard nothing worth noting, he used the leather cord to fashion the two swords to his mare as he acknowledged the sun heating the side of his face, its arc a couple of hours away from casting the whole path in shade.</p><p>Finished with tying the blades in a safe position, he finally began to lead the horses again, trading hands to press his knuckles into the bicep of his right arm. He cringed for the discomfort of it.</p><p>He’d needed a recovery day after climbing the fortress, and he obviously hadn’t managed one.</p><p>Sometimes, stupid decisions caught up to him.</p><p>If only because he didn’t want to chance Jaehyun witnessing him using the beads, he resisted his paranoia and instead trusted his very human ears to warn him of possibly-impending danger or descending bird men.</p><p>He concentrated on the earthy sounds of the forest around him, the gentle silence, the rhythmic pattern of horse hooves. The ground was somewhat spongey with the benefit of recently-passed rain, and petrichor lay heavy and clean in the air.</p><p>Through half-assed, unintentional meditation alone, he managed not to flinch when he saw a shadow cross the ground and a black smudge in his upper periphery. Jaehyun touched down behind them, silent if not for the hit of his soles against the ground and the way the trees crackled with artificial breeze.</p><p>Yuta turned just to watch him push his disarranged hair back off his forehead and meet his gaze.</p><p>“You have blood on your cheek,” Yuta said, letting go of Jaehyun’s horse and pulling his own ahead to make room on the path.</p><p>“You have blood on your hands,” Jaehyun said—not snidely, but attentive and calm. He brought a knuckle up to wipe at his cheekbone as he approached his horse. The freckles flaked away, leaving only a slight pink to his skin where he’d rubbed.</p><p>“Always do.”</p><p>Yuta was rewarded with a flash of dimple and that tell-tale little exhale through his nose as Jaehyun plucked his necklace from the saddlebag and returned it to its drapery under the front of his shirt where Yuta knew, now, a small stone pendant weighed it down. The belt came off next, Jaehyun brushing out the creases in his shirt, and then the rondel was back, snug at his hip.</p><p>Yuta exhaled slowly.</p><hr/><p>“How do you want me?” Jaehyun asked after Yuta had cleaned his blades and scrubbed his hands to ice in the stream, after they’d both eaten and the sun was so low as to paint the sky purple, after Yuta hadn’t said a word for hours and, for some reason, Jaehyun decided to break it first as soon as they had put their sleeping mats down. “First night or second?” His voice was dark and warm like amber, but softer than stone.</p><p>“I think we should spar before we sleep,” Yuta hedged as he knelt on the mat, “tomorrow.”</p><p>Jaehyun visibly hesitated in the low light, forearms tucked under the folds of the blankets he held, fingers pushing their edges into the creases of his arms. “With the swords,” he clarified—perhaps because he happened to have the only weapon Yuta owned that would hold up against his dirk, and sparring with knives wasn’t sparring. </p><p>“Unless I can have my rondel back for a time.”</p><p>“Only if you return the pin.”</p><p>“The pin isn’t <em> yours, </em> darling.”</p><p>Jaehyun bristled, flushing up to his ears for the first time in ages, pretty lips twisted into a grimace and his wings doing that flinching motion of unease, shuffling and aggressive. </p><p>Yuta felt something in him pinch. He laughed. He wondered which side of Jaehyun bedded marrieds and wooed secrets from their lips, which side flowed like gold in courts that skimmed the dredges of his power. </p><p>Biting down on words that would be too telling, he settled onto his side instead and proffered Jaehyun a smile. “I know,” Yuta amended, tugging the pin from his hair and slipping it to his thigh. “C’mon th—ha!” He laughed again under the folded blanket Jaehyun threw over his head, but tugged it away quickly out of either unease or habit. </p><p>It was hard to tell with himself sometimes, even as Jaehyun lowered himself down and carefully adjusted around him, tugging on the blankets then finally cradling his skull. It was easier this time for Yuta, even if it was at Jaehyun’s expense, and he could enjoy the warmth of Jaehyun’s arms and the flinch of his muscles under his shirt when Yuta slid his hand to his waist.</p><p>“How many were you up against?” Yuta asked as Jaehyun adjusted his wing over his head and blocked out the stars.</p><p>“Four,” Jaehyun said stiffly and slid his right thigh over Yuta’s.</p><p>Preen oil, sweat, earth, and something deeper that Yuta was coming to realize was Jaehyun’s particular magic profile.</p><p>At this rate, Jaehyun might become familiar.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Why is “bi su” italicized but nothing else is? The reason is purely mechanical. I kept stumbling over it when I was looking at my own work and misreading it. I would go ??? every time. Maybe it’s just me. I’m still thinking about whether I want to un-italicize it throughout the fic. If you see me do that, look away.</p><p><span class="big"><span class="u">Trivia:</span></span><br/>[All of this is solely from my independent research. If anyone knows better than I do, please let me know! I will gladly tweak the information I’m providing here. Also, please remember that a weapon’s name does not imply the existence of its country of origin in the world of Wist.]<br/><b>Blakas!</b> These originate from Bali, Indonesia and are used for chopping. They’re not typically used as weapons and are more commonly used in the kitchen. Ceremonial blakas are often decorated. They don’t <em>quite</em> look like your “typical” meat cleaver, so if you’re curious, I would simply look them up.<br/><b>Eared daggers!</b> This design was used during the Middle Ages and is likely inspired by a lot of different weapons. Either way, it’s a variation of the rondel, where its pommel has two protrusions (“ears”) that stick up and a little out. These allow for a thumb to slide comfortably into the space between them. Holding it like that allows for more stabbing leverage.<br/><b>Bangkungs!</b> They’re short swords originating from the Philippines and are particular to the Moro people of the Sulu. They’re usually about 50–75cm (19–29in) in length and get heavier toward the tip of the blade—this makes them a bit more of a hacking weapon with heavy blows. The hilts also have a curve to them and can be anywhere from rattan to metal.<br/><b>Knives vs daggers!</b> The most primary difference is that knives have a single edge where daggers have both. Daggers tend to be heavier and have a pointed tip. Knives are typically lighter and have a rounded tip. Daggers are designed to be weapons—knives can be used as weapons but are often designed for a broader range of utility and don’t stand up well for blocking heavy blows, which is why Yuta doesn’t use his <em>bi su</em> to parry.<br/><b>Bandits!</b> You know ‘em. All I want to say is that historically, roads were incredibly difficult to keep secure, and bandits/thieves were a constant risk without tight patrols, planned limitations, or tolls. Jaehyun and Yuta are <em>currently</em> traveling along an unmaintained path, but that’s why they’re not too surprised when being threatened becomes a mild reality. They’re in the outer regions of Syltris, where paved roads will continue to be rare and travelers are infrequent. If there are travelers and tradespeople, they’re in larger groups to protect themselves (caravans or the like!).</p><p>Anyway OOF. Long author’s note. If you changed your minds and you <em>don’t</em> want to hear my prattle, let me know! I’ll keep a tally or something and cater to the majority.</p><p>
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        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Your Lies, Your Silence: Both Are Forms of Truth</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>My apologies for the wait! The holidays threw me off my schedule. Given how this keeps happening, I ought to expect it. <em>HOPEFULLY</em> I'll be able to update on Monday again, but if not, expect me on Tuesday or Wednesday!</p><p>Thank you to everyone who comments ;; I'm not the best at replying in a timely manner, but I see them. I read them almost as soon as they arrive in my inbox. Thank you so, so much for your encouragement and appreciation ♡</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The sun was cold and wet with mist when Yuta crawled from sleep with a certain sound raking through the confines of his skull. His breath was muggy against Jaehyun’s collar bones, and he was soaked to the bone, clothes sticking to him like a fever.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He pushed out of Jaehyun’s arms and into straight into the scratchy brush that surrounded them, though Jaehyun’s fingers tightened against his skull for the briefest moment, and picked himself up from the ground with his dried sweat damp and the ache in the roots of his muscles swollen with dehydrated discomfort.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta wanted to crawl out of his skin.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dew slid off Jaehyun’s wings in a shower of crystal as his hands scrubbed over his face, a pink and blue from the cold dawn. The entire area was covered in a gross swath of condensation, the greenery turned faded with the trembling pale of water reflecting the milky sun. The recently-passed rain had made everything so verdant that even the ground between trees had sprouted new life—dotted with mushrooms, ferns, abelia that crawled and crowded. If a coniferous were disturbed, it would drop a caravan of glass that would hit the ground like rain.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>What had been every point of contact between Jaehyun’s body and his own was tacky with quickly-fading warmth, and Yuta could only figure out his cold legs and jerk his damp shirt off his body with nauseated hands. His core was warm, but his body was a fading map of physical contact, grotesque dampness, and a baked-in chill—clinging evidence of a vulnerability he was trying to subvert.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yuta—” Jaehyun’s voice was absolutely fucked, gnawed and gritty and thrusting so deep it rasped and creaked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m just taking a wash,” Yuta mumbled, narrowly avoiding sounding like he’d died even with a fully-functional voice. The river, almost obscured by the shrubbery and trees, did grace to him through its dim white noise. “I feel disgusting.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>In his periphery, Jaehyun shuddered, rubbing over his face again, his neck, pinching at his arms. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta wouldn’t be proposing a tent or similar covering—he wouldn’t be caging Jaehyun in like that—but they looked like two different nightmares. Jaehyun’s wings looked stiff with cold, feathers slowly raising like hairs on a gooseflesh arm, and his fingers were clumsy as he raked his hair back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“The pin,” Jaehyun ground out—almost pathetically—and Yuta’s hand jumped to where the bulb dug into his hip under his belt.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I have it.” He pulled it out and tucked it into his braid, slapping his damp-chilled shirt over his saddle on top of a bush just next to them. Retrieving his bran bag from one saddlebag and setting it aside with a shudder, he condemned himself to the idea of the paralyzing freeze of their river companion as soon as he wrestled his shoes, socks, and pants off. “Would you consider us even now that you can see me naked?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun made an inscrutable sound—perhaps in part because sleep had taken a grater to his vocal chords. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Remember when you stole the dead minister’s seal?” Yuta asked, the air biting his exposed skin and daring him to shiver. He unstrapped his weapons one by one until he was bare and gambling with his own comfort. He would take his </span>
  <em>
    <span>bi su</span>
  </em>
  <span> with him to the waterside. He slapped his raggedy sandals down on the earth. “I do. I hope you used it well.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was a narrow period of time between the death of a minister and the scrutiny of their official seal—it was a boon, and Yuta would have used it for a handful of discreet fraudulences. But Jaehyun had walked away with it instead, and he would have known he’d snagged it from the grasp of another thief (though there was no reason to believe Jaehyun would have remembered they were Yuta).</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun made another sound.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta looked over, catching Jaehyun’s morning-lightened eyes, the sun starting to dapple through the sparser canopy. Those eyes were trained carefully on Yuta’s face as he sat somewhat half-frozen on the mats. He must have caught Yuta’s next glance toward his reddened ears, because he closed his eyes and breathed out like a bereaved soul.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You can look,” Yuta prodded teasingly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>His body was an unattractive collection of unhappy scars. It was functional and fine and a testament to the learning curve life had been for him, but he was never wont to admire it. He hardly imagined Jaehyun had been.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“My ears are red because I’m </span>
  <em>
    <span>cold,”</span>
  </em>
  <span> Jaehyun said, and it would have been a snip at any other time of day, but once again his voice bastardized his intentions. The one wing that had started to de-puff from the waking chill fluffed up again in tandem with his words like the rise of a tide.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta bit his lip, tilting back a small breath of a laugh and feeling the knot of amusement tempt him into inadvisable daring. With how close they still were, he moved with confidence—the least detectable mood in action—and reached to brush his two smallest fingers over the shell of Jaehyun’s ear.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>His palm grazed his soft cheek simultaneously, half of his brain startled by the peach fuzz, as he felt the small heat of Jaehyun’s ear tingle through his fingertips.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun recoiled, eyes flashing open, and the wrist of Jaehyun’s wing would have clocked Yuta in the nose if he hadn’t retreated so quickly. Jaehyun’s ears were so red it almost hurt to look at them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Liar,” Yuta breathed, and Jaehyun’s expression of pure mutinous hatred and the stiff little jerk of his wings almost strangled a laughing apology from him. Instead, he smiled, and Jaehyun’s mouth flattened in a suppressive line, and Yuta hooked off his last layer of clothing right in front of him just to see if his eyes dropped.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They didn’t, Jaehyun’s gaze hard on Yuta’s face, and Yuta gave him a wider smile for it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta spared him anything more, grabbing his necessary things while shoving his sandals on and parting for the swollen river. In turn, he had to spare himself the temptation to check if Jaehyun was watching his departure. He wasn’t totally sure he wanted to know, and taunting aside, he wasn’t accustomed to being watched.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sliding down the sloped bank in the rapidly bone-chilling damp, he met the water with his toes and hissed, shuddering at the frigid burn. The water was slower just a short trek down, which he picked his way toward with some caution after tugging off his sandals, the gray river busily flushing down its bed. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The sunlight fringed over the forest canopy in a white glow, breathing up against the clear sky. Everything was a little bit alive around him—from the noise of the river to the water falling from the flora as fauna skidded through their pathways. This area was beautiful and untouched, similar to many Syltrin swaths of wild land but especially green for all the rain the region was drunk on. It was ideal for travel—dehydration seldom a reality and, were they forced to hunt, the game far from sparse.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta clenched his jaw amidst the bitter waters and soil so rich and dark it looked like black gold.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It would be worth the wash if his blood didn’t jump out of his skin first.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He broke out in goosebumps over the chill the second he went up to mid-calf as he tossed his dirty clothes and </span>
  <em>
    <span>bi su </span>
  </em>
  <span>on a damp bush nearby. Cringing with the first sopping pass and scrub of his bran bag dipped in the water, his knuckles turned red and his feet numbed in disembodiment within a minute. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Surrounded by solitude and a silence with which he was far more accustomed, it was easier to clear his head from the buildup of his own tension. Even as he lost his toes in the water and his genitals tried to crawl into his groin in fear over the sting of seemingly sub-zero temperatures, he felt silence clear out his brain, smoothing the knots and snags.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wiped his dripping nose with his wrist and dared to hum quiet enough under the rushing water that Jaehyun likely wouldn’t hear him—or not well—then slopped out of the water. He then left his bran bag, tugged his clothes over his arm, and waded right back in. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>His nether regions protested wildly the second he dropped to a crouch to rub the sweat and dirt out of his shirt underarms and cuffs. He shivered out another humming song in the midst of a laugh at his own body, then draped his shirt over his left shoulder for the cold when its cleanliness was sufficient. The ache in his old injury had left him, but the soreness was slow to follow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As he washed his pants, then his undergarments, he let his mind wander under the stinging, skinny ridges of his own body.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>With slow, reddened fingers and his clothes dripping down his own back, he reached back for the pin in his hair, pulled it free from his braid, and slid his touch over its shape—the rounded and slim tip, the black-jeweled bulb, its utter simplicity, and unengraved copper. With a firm and careful grip, he lowered it under the surface of the water.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>All charmed things worked best in an average range of temperatures; a cold too deep would make the magic sluggish and dull while a burn too hot would make it slippery and imprecise (according to the witchsmith back in Isdril, Avian magic wasn’t too different, really).</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The gemstone in the pin was supposed to be charmed—allegedly, presumably, hopefully—and Yuta didn’t want to lose an arm or something trying to activate it. He rubbed his thumb over the gem first, pressed at it, scratched it with his nail, and tapped it in the center of his palm. Nothing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Charmed items were tricky things and intentionally so. He wasn’t entirely committed to figuring it out, but he did chance pressing it to his lips—a few minutes away from turning blue.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was a dull, incomplete buzz against his sensitive mouth as a drop of water dripped down the curve of his bottom lip.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After a moment of processing that little buzz, he sighed half-heartedly at the likeliest of implications, both satisfied and disappointed. Standing up from the water, he wiped the bulb on the pantleg against his pec and relocated the pin back to his hair.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wouldn’t be able to properly guess a voice command if he tried, probably—and even if he could, he didn’t want to chance being heard.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta made the naked trek back to Jaehyun, barring any self-consciousness by covering his crotch as he folded and squeezed the water out of his pants.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun, prepared, was looking in the opposite direction from his return, fingers pausing mid-preen, then continuing without a glance. He was carefully removed from Yuta’s immediate proximity, but Yuta had probably earned that mild form of distrust by touching his ears.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun would forgive him.</span>
</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span>That night, at their last sleeping stop before they hit Dusong, Yuta offered him both swords. After testing them himself, Yuta could say that the only substantial difference was their curve—or the lack thereof. The balance between the two wasn’t the same, and they were both improperly made. Yuta didn’t have any real preference between two substandard options.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Nonetheless, when Jaeyun chose the curved blade, Yuta felt a tingle burrow into his spine. He expected him to choose the straight-bladed bangkung if only because the balance was easier to adjust into from dirks.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He tried to bite back the spark under his tongue: “Why did you choose that one?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun glanced up off the oxidized bangkung iron as he tested his own grip, then held Yuta’s gaze. It rarely happened from so close, his eyes dark in the late day and his body within attack’s reach. “To make you ask questions.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta threw his head back and laughed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>In his periphery, he saw Jaehyun’s wings twitch, and Yuta swung. It drew a curse from the Avia’s lips in the startled, clunky clash of their two swords, and Jaehyun threw his weight forward instead of back. Yuta backpedaled, escaping the lock, sword arm sore but the rush in his limbs making his smile stay.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun exhaled through his nose, tension smoothing out and his small, private jerkiness being tucked away. But Jaehyun’s gaze snagged on Yuta’s at a safe distance, and he adjusted his grip again. Some of his grace faded in a shallow discomfort displayed by his ears.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Perhaps for the sake of his slipped cards, Jaehyun swung next, and Yuta let himself enjoy Jaehyun’s more tentative performance. It would be gorgeous to see him in his element—Jaehyun very obviously wasn’t just talent and genetics. There was skill to the way he handled his weapons, but it wasn’t easy for Yuta to parse whether he was self-taught or not.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta had once had his sister to teach him the basics. Common attacks, then impractical flourishes they made up together like an elaborate handshake or choreography. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Sparring the same partners without outside stimulation led to dancing, not fighting.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He had no reason to hope, but there was a draw in trying to parse Jaehyun’s patterns. If he had any, which he did—at least for the moment.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Despite the room they had in this clearing in particular, where the trees were spaced farther apart and the undergrowth was sparse, Jaehyun still wasn’t using his wings. He had enough clearance to spread them, but he kept them tucked. The most he ever did was use them for balance—small tweaks, and very occasionally a twitch of his tail. It was like watching the tendons of a hand in the midst of writing: small, precise movements that were easy to ignore in the face of greater flourishes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was firmly right-footed, which made Yuta feel at ease assuming he was just as firmly right-handed. Though that wasn’t any assurance he’d test his life against, since Yuta himself was ambidextrous from practice alone. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He favored more vertical attacks over horizontal, which would have made more sense if he used his wings; he prioritized keeping his body squared or mostly-squared, unwilling to use any spinning momentum at risk of exposing his wings or tail; he held a sword with competence rather than discomfort, which was gently surprising given his lack of relevant equipment; and he didn’t make much eye-contact, though that could have been attributed to anything—he’d been that way from even their first time crossing blades.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It felt different to do this now than it had the first time, though. Yuta didn’t feel any real sense of danger keeping him on his toes, only a peaceful threat of them testing each other’s boundaries—almost playfully if the tiny risk Jaehyun took to try and grab his wrist in the midst of a brief lock said anything. The idea of being thrown by Jaehyun was utterly terrifying in a thrilling way. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But thrilling terror aside, neither of them were pushing, the heat being worked up subtle and welcome as the descending sun cooled the air. Every mild clash was a glance at Jaehyun’s reserved expression and a new question or quip Yuta wrestled away from his own tongue.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They hadn’t said anything since the spar began—hadn’t said much to each other all day—but he was alright with it. He rather enjoyed the uninterrupted opportunity to chase Jaehyun’s gaze slipping away from him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When the thrum in his body settled and had been matching his heart rate for a few minutes at least, Yuta finally slid back from Jaehyun’s sword, the two edges singing against each other despite their amateur make. “I’m done.” Smile reserved, Yuta caught his breath two safe steps away, and Jaehyun let him disengage with his own steps back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Watching Jaehyun as his blood settled from a soft rage to a sweet, buzzing calm, Yuta leaned the bangkung up against the nearest tree and rubbed the residue of his sword’s improperly-treated handle on his pantleg, his calluses stinging in adjustment to the weight of grip he’d relinquished. Jaehyun crouched for his saddlebag and dragged out an old rag to wipe over his face and under the firm lines of his jaw. It mussed his eyebrows and made the soft flush in his face more apparent by the pressure of each pass over his skin.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta felt good, the soreness in his body warmed enough that he’d be able to stretch some of the ache out of his muscles. His mind was humming, not a single voice scratching through his brain other than his own.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Jaehyun.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun visibly flinched, cloth pausing over his temple and staying there like a shutter over his periphery, and though Yuta perhaps should have expected that reaction, it still made him laugh. “I’m sorry,” Yuta said, unapologetic but fond. “Should I call you ‘darling,’” Yuta began to ask, unfurling the word gently in his mouth, “like I did last night?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The light was not generous, but they’d stopped earlier than usual, and the sky hadn’t gone dark yet. The low sunset turned the strands of Jaehyun’s hair a glowing brown, the gloss of his quiet wings reflecting the orange light and feathered shadows, and the color of his visible ear was a bruised, pretty pink.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And for the first time in Jaehyun’s company, a vulnerable, uncomfortable, and vaguely obscene thought crossed Yuta’s mind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It traced the back of his skull in a whisper of full color, every edge and texture so fine that the sensation raised the hairs at the back of his neck.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta exhaled through his nose in a measured breath, smile dying just as Jaehyun’s hand and rag dropped from his face. He graced Yuta with eye-contact and spoke back, his voice that warm evening amber. “What were you going to ask?” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun dodging the “darling” question should have made him feel something, but it didn’t.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“After we pass through Dusong, would you do me the pleasure of sparring like this every evening?” Yuta felt numb as he said it, the words sounding practiced and weird for the multiple rounds they had absently taken in his head.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It wasn’t an absurd or bizarre question, but it had that same flirtatious curve Yuta hadn’t been able to shake since the first slide of its edge over Jaehyun’s skin. And Jaehyun was holding his gaze like they were bargaining in Prinks all over again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He held it unwaveringly for so many seconds that Yuta genuinely felt the flight part of his brain wake up and wedge itself into the rising noise inside his head. Right alongside the image of Jaehyun mouthing at the fortress lady’s ear. He could almost feel it, his memory always too vivid, and now he had to clench his jaw under Jaehyun’s dark attention to stop himself from overreacting to a near hallucination. From swatting at the space beside his ear and moving far, far away from the Avia dripping gold in the light of a dying sun.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay,” Jaehyun said finally, and Yuta barely swallowed his tongue back from cussing Jaehyun out right then and there.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s it?” Yuta asked, voice tight whether he wanted it to be or not. He endured scrutiny for a full minute just for Jaehyun to say “okay”?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Less piercing this time, Jaehyun’s gaze traced over Yuta’s expression, slow and passive.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta was a single, very thin thread away from thumbing at the handle of his back dagger to steady himself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yeah,” Jaehyun said, “that’s it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A very sharp image of him pivoting on his own heel and booking it for the other side of the forest on foot overtook Yuta. He flexed his hands to banish it, trying to ground this unreasonable bout of skittishness that so easily drowned out his post-sparring calm. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>This proximity was one he’d thrust on </span>
  <em>
    <span>Jaehyun.</span>
  </em>
  <span> Yuta had done this to himself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Forcibly, he loosened the tension in his chest with a small laugh. He raised his shoulder halfway to his right ear before wrangling the compulsion down.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Restless, he lifted his bangkung from the position he’d left it in and held his hand out for the one he’d given Jaehyun. The Avia rose from his crouch, rearranged his wings with an air of controlled peace, and offered it back with his hold around the hilt.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Scared that touching Jaehyun might make him shudder, Yuta wrapped his hand around the blade collar instead and pulled the sword away. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Without another word or glance, Jaehyun turned his back while Yuta held two blades in ambidextrous hands and realized the disparity of Jaehyun’s careful maneuvering while they’d sparred versus now, his wings and tail vulnerable and a gently ruffled black.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It didn’t make any sense. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta’s mind was scrambled. The twilit atmosphere felt funny, a small, miniscule pressure. He could swear there was a tinge of Jaehyun’s magic suddenly in the air, though that had to be paranoia.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He finally placed it, smelling like mountains and feeling like ash being stroked against his skin. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>A breath.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was being paranoid.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta took a step back. Back toward the whickering horses.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m going to go bathe,” Jaehyun said, voice that absurd, warm baritone, “if you want to set up the bed.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’d missed something. Yuta had missed something. There’d been a shift, and he hadn’t sensed it.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Have fun, angel.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>“Alright.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun did not expose himself, fully-clothed and walking off toward that same river they’d been loosely hugging to lead them through each settlement. The same one Yuta had washed himself in at dawn, though those particular waters had passed, long gone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was alone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta lowered himself to his knees. He took out all his knives, laying them out side by side, flipped interchangeably, counting them to control his breathing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wanted to run.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wanted to run.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He wanted to run.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He didn’t.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He unrolled the sleeping mats, resheathed his weapons, rolled up his sleeves, and forced himself to unbraid his hair. Slowly, meticulously, he ran his callused fingertips against his skull, eyes closed, the wooden beads of his bracelet drifting against his hairline. And then he rebraided it all over again, taking his time in the midst of a forest falling asleep.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>In whatever time was left, he stretched, carefully pulling each arm across his chest then behind his head, reaching out to his toes, rolling his neck and feeling the weight of his braid and the pin it cradled graze the back of his neck.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He fought against the urge to look up when he heard Jaehyun approach with the sound of sandals through perennially-fallen leaves and detritus, though he couldn’t stop himself from opening his eyes. He watched his own hands, instead—how they passed over the mats as he moved himself higher up the meager bedding, cross-legged—then the sky through the spaced-out canopy, ahead and past Jaehyun’s crown. The moon was brighter than it had been yet, but the stars were still visible.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A chill reached down his spine, unbidden.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta breathed steadily, searching for ash and mountain and finding nothing, and he finally brought his eyes to Jaehyun, who stared right up until the very moment Yuta was looking. “Did you have a nice bath?” Yuta asked, calmer now, settled again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Shifting, crouching in his sandals and fresh clothes with the rondel resting at that lovely diagonal in its leather and sheath up against his hip, Jaehyun replaced and retrieved some things from his saddlebags—his linen-wrapped soap for a makeshift spool of twine and a small metal bell.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>His forearms were bare for the first time Yuta had seen them since the fortress, his sleeves rolled up and tucked as he rearranged his clothes, threading the twine through the clasps in his washed-wet shirt and one leg of his pants as the bell rattled in the curve of his fingers. “Yes,” Jaehyun said eventually. In the moonlight, the pinkish cold of his skin was an accented shadow against the tip of his nose, his ears, his cheeks.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The muscles in his forearms were visible as they flexed and moved, fingers slow and deft, and then he was reaching for the nearest branch between his bags and Yuta’s body, not too high up. He strung his clothes up to drip, the first splash two feet from Yuta’s knee, then secured the bell at the end he knotted, shining silver in the moonlight but covered, slightly, by the sparse twigs and leaves surrounding it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I thought about asking for a trade,” said Jaehyun, and though his voice was its nightly usual, Yuta felt like he’d split all his thoughts in half just by starting a conversation on his own, “but we both benefit from sparring.” He said it like an apology as he traded his sandals for fresh socks and his same old boots. It felt like one.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What kind of trade?” left Yuta’s mouth before he could contemplate his own response. He didn’t move when Jaehyun settled beside him on the mats, kneeling with his soles off the edge and his tail feathers undisturbed by his heels. He had one hand planted on the bedding between them, the divot between his thumb and wrist, carved by his tendon, this lovely, deadly thing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Telling me about your scars,” Jaehyun murmured after a pause. He was looking at his clothing, following each moonlit drop with his eyes, and Yuta dragged his own gaze away from both Jaehyun’s profile and his own sundry markings visible even with what little skin Yuta was showing. Like a dead fish rising from a lake, he could feel each divot and raised memory on his body speak up and make sound.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Do you mean the physical ones or the mental ones?” Yuta barely managed to joke, blurring out their whispers. “I’ll tell you about them if you let me ask one question a day.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Am I permitted to lie?” The reply came without pause, ready and clever, though Yuta couldn’t pick up any humor.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>One sparring match, one scar, one lie.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s posture wasn’t perfect at the moment. His angles were sloped, one palm on his knee and the other shifting from his idle thumb as it rubbed back and forth on the mat between them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Pick a scar,” Yuta decided, keeping his mouth moving so other things didn’t. “If you were paying enough attention.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Left forearm,” Jaehyun said, mouth moving like his mind was elsewhere. “The long one.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The detail was condemning, but Yuta tamped down any reaction that might have stirred with it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I fell,” Yuta said. “It happens a lot when you’re running and worried about what’s behind you, and you can’t treat it until it’s already started scabbing over. I think I tripped over a body. Or a beam. I can’t remember.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Somewhere, an owl made a tentative sound in the woods.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He could remember. Or he thought he did. Sometimes, it was hard to know for sure if his memories were as grotesque as he recalled or if his fears had enhanced them. If the endless repeat in his nightmares changed their horrid gray and crimson to garish slops of color.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun didn’t respond, but his wings did disturb when Yuta spoke again—like an aborted hunch of his posture, a near destruction of his posture entirely before he straightened under the question, rolling his shoulders back ever so slightly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Is ‘Jaehyun’ your real name?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It wasn’t important in the regular scheme of things. Yuta didn’t have access to masses of ledgers and histories. Names didn’t hold any particular power unless they were wrapped in a charm. It was just that “Jaehyun” curled out of the mouth like the breath of Syltris, not remotely foreign.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s my name,” Jaehyun said at length, just before Yuta seriously considered the possibility of being ignored.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta nodded, then gestured for Jaehyun to move. To get this ritual over with where a more peaceful sleep was secure in a careful headlock. Jaehyun obeyed, hands smelling like clove while the rest of him was just cold and preen oil and not a single hint of mountains and ash.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="u"><span class="big">Trivia:</span></span><br/><b>Dusong!</b> This is NOT based off of Dusong Peninsula in Busan. That is all.<br/><b>Bran bags!</b> These were traditionally used by the Japanese people while showering—<em>before</em> entering the bath, should they have a hot bath available. Romanized, they're called nuka-bukuro and are made by sewing a handful of bran into a small piece of linen, creating a soft washing material. Yuta combined the traditional and modern back in Monic and flipped the practice around—bathing with soap and his bran bag, then using a bucket of water to rinse after the fact. Given what the hospice provided him, this is what he chose to do.<br/><b>Blade collar!</b> From what pictures I've been able to consult of bangkungs, they seem to have blade collars instead of ricassos, which doesn't surprise me! Ricassos are the brief, unsharpened length between a blade's sharpened edge(s) and handle, but are primarily a European thing. Blade collars are strips of metal between a hilt and blade—they sometimes exist even with the presence of a crossguard/quillion.<br/><b>Ministers!</b> I had originally used "chancellor," but that's a far more European word. I have chosen to use "minister" instead, as it's the word that describes a diversity of ranked government officials in both Korea and Japan—throughout history and currently. Originally, the minister's seal was going to be on a ring, but guess what! Rings weren't super popular in Japan and Korea! However!! In the Joseon dynasty, they were worn by women to convery certain kinds of information. Look up <em>garakji</em> and <em>panji</em> if you're curious. In any case, when I say "seal" in relation to the minister, I'm referring to something like the Korean <em>guksae/oksae</em> or Japanese <em>inkan/hanko</em>—something like a stamp for ink signatures (other cultures also use these).<br/><b>Forests!</b> I'm not going to get too nerdish here. I just wanted to say that, though Yuta does not know the names of every tree and shrub, I loosely imagined the area they're in to have zelkovas and abelias in particular—especially that first area. They're in a deciduous forest, currently, which (based off Korean forests) includes oaks, maples, alders, zelkovas, and birches. Abelias are ornamental shrubbery that bloom from spring to fall!</p><p>Did I forget anything? If I did, feel free to comment and ask. I'll answer anything I missed in the beginning author's note next chapter.<br/>Concerning research and world building, that is. I won't be answering any questions about why Jaehyun is like *gestures broadly* <em>that.</em></p><p>
  <a href="https://twitter.com/speckledsolana">twitter</a>
  <br/>
  <a href="https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1">curiouscat</a>
  <br/>
</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. And Yet I Cannot Seem to Bear It</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I need a reset. The holidays threw me off and getting back on the horse was not as simple for me as I wanted it to be, so the next time I will update will be the 18th ♡ Thank you for your patience in advance ;;</p><p>Also, this chapter threw me for a loop for a bit, and I ended up removing the end for chapter 9 instead. I hope, though this chapter is no 2 or 6, that this one is still enjoyable, and I hope to speed things up from here.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>He lost his name.</p>
</div><div class="center"></div><div class="center">
  <p>It was somewhere in the fuzzy sounds of his memories, trapped in a bubble between lips he could only remember opening and closing like the maw of a fish at the surface of water or the slow flap of dark pink cloth breaking across midday.</p>
</div><div class="center"></div><div class="center">
  <p>The open hallways had shone against the floors. He remembered the textures of the walls: unsafe. He remembered the sound of descending the mountains: distinctive, big.</p>
</div><div class="center"></div><div class="center">
  <p>If he remembered anything, it was all in darting, fizzled-out dances of air beyond the cup of his wings. They were jarring, incomplete, un-beautiful.</p>
</div><div class="center"></div><div class="center">
  <p>The green of the trees at dawn could have been torment. They could have been innocence.</p>
</div><div class="center"></div><div class="center">
  <p>His head was a muddle of one more than the other, and he could never remember—know for certain—that the frightening moment of glimpsing something old, so old, wasn’t actually caught between the fingers of a twenty-one-year-old with ten streaks down his arm in a tartan of fury and disgust.</p>
</div><div class="center"></div><div class="center"></div><hr/><p> </p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun was bearing a different air of silence when they hit Dusong.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta couldn’t explain it, but he’d woken up like that. He’d opened his wings almost like the blink of a butterfly, closed them, and then seemingly forgot to acknowledge Yuta at all. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And Jaehyun had been quiet in the morning every single day—Yuta knew what that looked like. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>This was Jaehyun looking down at the ground for five hours into daylight, posture immaculate, wings still, his hands passing slowly over the reins in rhythmic unavailability.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The tools for lighting a fire were thrown deep down in the water.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Jaehyun,” Yuta had said an hour from Dusong.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun turned his ear toward him but not his eyes. His gaze steadied somewhere between the path and nothing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you okay?” Asking should have been difficult, but the question had been stirring in Yuta’s brain since Jaehyun’s hands had slipped while securing his saddle that morning. One of the buckles had scraped up the curve of his forefinger and nicked the creases of his knuckle. He hadn’t so much as flinched. It was scabbed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun did not respond, but his silence was drawn-out and slow, dragging. He corrected the angle of his head and settled like the wind easing an open door back closed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There had been a part of him that had wanted to stop. Some part of him that said they couldn’t go on until heat registered in Jaehyun’s bones, but he couldn’t logically understand the excuse. Why shouldn’t they be able to travel just because Jaehyun hit a lurch? What about that made Yuta feel like he ought to stop? </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And so they hit Dusong.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Or, rather. Yuta arrived at Dusong with a body.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was a village—the last of small settlements before they arrived at an actual city (not Geran, but a city nonetheless). It had a stable, though they were still at the mercy of a hospice for the night.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The entire first hours there were spent with the horses. Grazing and water had been ample throughout their journey so far, but grooming had been about as on-and-off as their own had been.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>In the musky shelter with all the necessary tools and supplies they were permitted to borrow, Yuta did more for his mare than simply giving her a hoof-check and as thorough a rub from the blanket between her hide and the saddle as he could.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s roan received the same, proper care from the Avia himself, arms bare up to the elbows and expression so shuttered that there was no body language to speak of. He seemed to move a beat slower than Yuta was accustomed, achieving a modicum more grace as he went through each step.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>If it weren’t so unnatural to be working side-by-side with Jaehyun in such a state, Yuta would be content to watch him for the elegance he achieved alone. But it was unnatural, so Yuta attempted to keep at a similar pace to finish at precisely the same time. He wasn’t keen on the idea of waiting for Jaehyun to finish with nothing for his own hands to do.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When they were done, it was a small journey of carrying their saddlebags to the hospice. They provided an egg and vegetable stew. Jaehyun ate across from him. Yuta took one bite and then waited, unwilling to pull out his silver but too out of practice eating food without caution to avoid nausea.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Instead, he took out and redid his braid, studying Jaehyun’s face since the man wasn’t making eye contact anyway. It was rude, but Yuta was uneasy and there was a miniscule reduction in his own tension as Jaehyun seemed to stiffen under his scrutiny over time.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was watching, so he could see it in the smoothness of his face: the immaculate way he was eating increasingly stilted and slow, spoon weighed for anything that might drip off before raising; the tightness in his jaw where the baby hairs blending into vellus softened its slope as he chewed; his wings drawing inward over time so that they passed a different line of perspective in the notches of the wooden table; his thumbprint whitening where it pressed to the handle of his spoon.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He really did have a lovely face, but it was less and less in the way Yuta recalled it—his early impressions had been skewed by a sort of spotless posturing, and those were now ground down by sweaty nights and red ears. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>So many people were a map of features that worked together but not alone, making them beautiful or strange or too-sharp. Jaehyun’s features were interesting on their own and not particularly flattering, though built with some intention, it seemed. Like an artist had brushed his soft cupid’s bow and fine-lined eyelids, had scrubbed his eyebrows, smoothed out his nose, and lowered his mouth a little more than the average mouth placement.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Together, if Yuta unfocused his vision, all of it looked normal. Jaehyun was handsome, average, mesmerizing and lovely but artfully nonthreatening.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Apart and in focus, he was odd. Unique in a way that a person’s fingers dug into clay. Bizarre with cut eyes and a weight underneath that made emotions pop like static shock.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When Jaehyun’s spoon came up with only dregs, he finally looked Yuta in the face. Yuta didn’t know Jaehyun’s eyes well, but he seemed present. His eyes looked alive, if unremarkably.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta forced himself to hold that gaze, and one corner of Jaehyun’s mouth drew out in some inscrutable something. Jaehyun angled his spoon at Yuta’s bowl then made a gesture. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>There wasn’t any rolling in his stomach to speak of, any pinching, any tingling on his tongue that wasn’t the sting of red pepper. He was done using his hair as an hourglass, anyway. Yuta picked up his spoon and ate.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The hospice was small—smaller, somehow, than Monic’s, though Monic’s hospice had seemed refashioned from a building of worship. This one was all wood and stone, treated but unpolished, sufficient but rough-hewn.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Its workers were a triad, the rooms five with three occupied (two residents were ill, one had a work injury), and Yuta had requested one room.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He’s tame?” the worker who had let them in had asked, and Yuta’s hackles had risen with a sharp breath. Their eyes had been reserved, wary, and Jaehyun didn’t say a word.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Who told you they were rabid,” Yuta said. “I don’t need one room to keep him on a leash. We’re lovers.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The hospice worker blushed across their neck like a rash.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta’s mouth had fizzled with his unpremeditated excuse. He’d tasted copper.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Now, against red pepper, his inner cheek throbbed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>From the right hall, a person with shaggy hair limped out into the eating area—obviously the injured tenant—and stopped, staring at them both.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The room was fairly small. There was only one table.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta swallowed. “You can ask for food in the kitchen. We haven’t eaten it all.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Confrontation tended to make people’s eyes drop, and this person was no different. With a shuffle of their hands over the crutch they were using, they hobbled for the adjacent doorway, ogling what was likely the fringe of Jaehyun’s wings and tail as the plumage rested past the bottom of his stool.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta ate faster the moment their eyes scooted into the kitchen, slurping up the poached egg as Jaehyun slowly swirled his spoon against the bottom of his bowl, watching the dredges.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He was done before the injured tenant even reentered the room. He forced Jaehyun to surrender his bowl and utensil via a swift takeover and left him to stiffly droop in the room alone while he shuttled their shit to the kitchen.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He passed the tenant on the way and just hoped they wouldn’t be stupid.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The room was one stone hearth, a slab counter, a row of barrels, a scattered aggregate of food miscellany, and a singular kitchen hospice worker dragging their hands through paste and cut radish.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The very second they raised their head and saw him at the slop barrel in the corner, scraping the little bits out of the bowls, they asked with bald, unabashed ignorance, “Where did you find him?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He can hear you,” Yuta said and didn’t turn to check how they received that information.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s just,” they said, voice as low as can be, now, and Yuta could hear them wiping their hands on a cloth, “I’ve never seen one before.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He’s extremely boring,” said Yuta, not lowering his voice at all as he dropped the bowls in the dirty water bucket and rolled up his sleeves. “Leave him alone.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“My mother says they’re harbingers of death. Especially the ones with black wings,” they said, body closer than Yuta was comfortable having anyone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta turned to face their thick, dark eyelashes and chapped mouth in the midst of the tiny, broth- and damp-smelling room, water up to his elbows in sodden scraps. They were close enough to stab. “Leave </span>
  <em>
    <span>me</span>
  </em>
  <span> alone.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Their lips pursed, and then they blurted like it was a compulsion, “That’s an ugly scar.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Happens,” Yuta said, rigid, tearing his eyes away from their face, and doing a shoddy job washing these stupid bowls. They clunked out of his grip against the thick wooden sides, and he leaned further to reach for at least one. His periphery shifted, he lurched. “Don’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>touch me.”</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>The sound of pain from their lips was like the yelp of a cat, hand crabbing from the wet hold he had on their wrist, the knuckle of his thumb digging into the space right between bones. Their fingers were a breath away from his jaw, their eyes damp from shock, wrist warm, knuckles split and scarred raw from a skin condition exacerbated by work.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He let them go, and they clasped their arm in mute protectiveness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They were very young. Probably not even an adult.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta didn’t care.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He went back to washing the bowls, and the hospice worker left him alone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When Yuta passed back into the eating room, Jaehyun was up against the far wall instead of sitting down. He wasn’t leaning there—what with his wings—but he was standing with a sort of casual poise that suggested to Yuta that the current situation, where the tenant was scooping dripping spoonfuls into their mouth with distracted abandon and their eyes riveted on his wings like a creature transfixed, had been going on for some time. How they weren’t made more shy by the two swords hanging from the saddlebags slung over a harbinger of death’s shoulder, Yuta couldn’t fathom.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta would have cared about Jaehyun handling his stuff at literally any other time.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun followed him into the hallway without a single glance or comment, then closed the door behind them when they were finally sequestered in the tiny hospice room.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The window was open, spilling late day against the stone floor with sounds of life feeding through its gape. The wooden shutters were tangled up in shrubbery growing up right outside it, the sill thick from the build of its stone walls. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It could have been pretty.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta untucked the back of his shirt so he could unsheathe his back knife, making his way over to the window. Jaehyun dropped their bags to the floor. Yuta pushed at the brambles with his bare hands and cut off the pieces that wouldn’t budge enough to allow the shutters to close as the sky yawned in a vast, slowing blue upon his head. He could see the backs of the wood-and-stone houses surrounding them, in through windows with dried herbs, gardens with nettles and summer vegetables, the dirty tail of a path.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m sorry for calling us lovers,” he said under his breath. He only wanted to be heard by Jaehyun and not through the thin, insufficient walls or through an adjacent window. “And you boring.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ve never been called boring before,” Jaehyun said in a low voice like crystallized honey, unused throughout the day, and Yuta squeezed his eyes closed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was heat, there. In his eyes. Like he’d walked too close to a fire.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta didn’t know what to say, and Jaehyun didn’t contribute anything more. It sounded like Jaehyun was rearranging things when he began to move again—picking around his bags or unrolling a sleeping mat—but Yuta wasn’t in the realm of caring.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta kept pruning the bush until he could pry the window closed with its shoddy little metal clasps, but then he opened it again so as to not condemn them to darkness before sleep. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>His body throbbed like his heartbeat was coaxing everything from his blood to his bones to just </span>
  <em>
    <span>stop</span>
  </em>
  <span> and ease up, so he stepped away from the window and sank to the floor, eyes closed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When he tilted his head back, the pin clinked against the stone with its ever-present persistence.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He opened his eyes to Jaehyun watching him, their most common shared activity.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m okay,” Yuta told him, and Jaehyun’s attention slid away, back to attending his bag. Yuta let himself watch in turn for a time, though Jaehyun wasn’t doing anything more than a rote inventory check by the look of it before shifting his bags to a corner of the room and separated from Yuta’s.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I bet one of these houses has a book,” Yuta said to Jaehyun when the Avia’s activity stalled. He hadn’t seen any hospice bookshelves this time, but all those open windows were an invitation if nothing else. “I don’t have errands to run.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun brought his gaze back over, and it was a relief. It was a relief and Yuta was too exhausted to question the emotion.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A beat of silence passed. “I think they’d notice me waiting outside their house while you stole a book.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That sounds like the ideal distraction.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Aren’t you tired?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’ve been sitting for three days.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“On a horse.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta laughed through his nose, little more than air and wonder, then let his head fall forward so he could roll the back of his neck. He tugged on his own elbow, pulling at the muscles of his left shoulder. For all his need to rest, he couldn’t seem to do it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>There was a narrow thudding sound near Yuta’s feet, and he flinched.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A book.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun was lowering himself to the ground, kneeling at a slant so his tail feathers didn’t scrape against the floor.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He obviously hadn’t vanished and returned to the room in the five seconds he had his eyes down, so this had to be from Jaehyun’s bags.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Is this from Monic?” Yuta asked, reaching for its worn edges, the concertina folds looking worse for wear.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun shook his head, leaning onto his hand as the sun hit him at an angle across his cheekbones. It was the oil of his skin that made him shine like he had been dusted with gold against his warm skin, and his hair and feathers had that greenish lustor that was so inhuman but so mesmerizing. “I have this one memorized.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta handled it gently, opening up to the first page but not really processing anything he saw. “I’m not actually bored,” he had to say first, “by you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He didn’t get a response for it, but Yuta didn’t let himself check for some form of expression, instead flipping to the middle and putting his literacy to use.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After half a page in, Yuta glanced up.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Is this an epistle?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s gaze remained steady. “It was in a bag I stole years ago.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta flipped back to the first page. The city it was written for was listed, the name of the official who’d compiled and delivered it—or at least their pen name, the signature seal, everything. “I don’t even know where this is from.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Northern Syltris, I think,” said Jaehyun, and he shrugged. Yuta had never seen him shrug before. “They were asking for greater awareness of the drought in the surrounding areas from the local courts—it’s a collection. There’s a poem written by a teenager in the back.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And you memorized it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I used to get bored.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Thumbing through more of the pages on his way to the back, Yuta laughed. Admittedly, he didn’t have much of a craving for books, though he’d read plenty growing up. He’d had an education, of a sorts, but he also used to like stories.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>After a moment scanning over poetic words that moved him very little, Yuta closed the book and gave it back to Jaehyun, tossing it carefully so it landed flat by his bent wrist. Yuta then stood up to gather his saddlebags and bring them to the spot he’d just abandoned.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>For the mindless paranoia, he too did his inventory check.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Did they touch you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta’s hands slowed. His jaw tingled. He hadn’t expected Jaehyun to bother with that particular detail—Yuta hadn’t intended on asking about the injured tenant and the possible microaggressions they’d very likely directed at Jaehyun. It felt ignorant, somehow, or perhaps more than he thought their boundaries allowed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And he wasn’t sure what he would have done if they had managed to touch him successfully. He wasn’t in the habit of reacting lethally to the average citizen, but for a moment there, his hand had considered spraining something.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He didn’t let any silence settle this time, sifting through his two cloaks, his bagh nakh and money, his water, and when he was done, he found himself looking through the window and the ribbons of light turning purple to rose.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Walk with me?” he asked, voice aimed at thin air given how much time they spent either looking at each other deliberately or deliberately not looking at each other. He would have liked to go alone, but that wasn’t in the cards.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Always taking a beat to seemingly process Yuta’s meddlesome words, Jaehyun stood only after a few seconds had passed, lifting his saddlebags back up from the floor and draping them over his shoulder yet again.</span>
</p>
<hr/><p>
  <span>Southern Syltris really was lush. Its generous weather flowed right into Ienkra, Yuta recalled—their side of the border had looked no different, and if it hadn’t been for walls and camps, he would have never known one from the other.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta’s fingertips tingled with dozens of phantom touches as he let himself brush every plant in his path. They walked the fringe of Dusong where there was room to remain side-by-side and the residences pressed up into the trees or gave way to cultivated swathes. The village was too cramped and unpathed to be reminiscent of Isdril, all the gardens separated by only dirt paths, all the streets merely swept. It was undeniably prettier than Monic, though, less cold though more unkempt.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He supposed it showed in the people, who didn’t mind staring or reaching out to touch strangers.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A local putting up their laundry under the clean sky had frozen and stared at them at the beginning of their walk, and as was Jaehyun’s habit, the Avia didn’t so much as deign to acknowledge the attention.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was as the darkness started cooling the humid air and all the residents tucked into their walls that Yuta spoke.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’re not sparring today,” he said, “but can I ask a question anyway?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jaehyun didn’t answer. He didn’t look at him and didn’t make any motion to indicate he’d heard, but that wasn’t any real deterrent when exceptional hearing was a definitive feature of his race.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“How did you know to wake me?” Yuta asked, and Jaehyun tilted his head but said nothing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>As the dwindling light turned vivid greens to gray, Yuta plucked a leaf from a bramble they passed and pivoted back the way they came. Jaehyun did the same.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Yuta ran his nail along the leaf’s midrib, digging the fiber against the tip of his thumb as the step-worn dirt under their boots went from the color of used dust to ash. If he were to look up, he’d see the stars start to freckle up and buckle down, but he wasn’t interested.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I can hear your heartbeat,” Jaehyun said finally.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>His insides cringed with a stutter-stop. He dropped the leaf.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well,” he said, “that’s terrible.” And left it at that.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="big"><span class="u">Trivia:</span></span><br/>(in literally no particular order)<br/><b>Concertina binding!</b> This is a way of binding that involves folding rather than stitches. There are ways to do this with or without adhesive. This particular method has a long history and has been used for Buddhist texts since the middle of the Goryeo period in Korea (918–1392). Side‐stitched binding became more predominant in Korea in the thirteenth century. That is to say: it seemed like a very plausible binding method for me to reference in Wist. Yuta does not have an extensive knowledge of the various book-binding methods, so consider that tidbit courtesy of . . . me.</p><p><b>Hospices!</b> They're homes used for the care of the ill, but many early hospitals and hospices were multi-purpose institutions that housed travelers, the sick, and the poor. Historically, they were usually run by religious institutions, but I'm keeping religion in Wist ambiguous, especially since I am 100% positive Yuta doesn't give a fuck regardless except to compare Jaehyun to an angel (see chapter 2) and use the word "damn" in a variety of ways. If I were to edit Wist with a fine-tooth comb, I would remove those references and slip-ups. Still might. Anyway. Routes that were popular with traders would have businesses such as inns to accommodate them when they passed through, but the average village didn't often have inns.</p><p><b>Carrion crows!</b> Yuta has made this detail blatant about Jaehyun from the beginning, but whether Jaehyun is <em>literally</em> straight from the carrion breed is not necessarily true and not easy to defend. Regardless, it is in reference to how crows would feed on dead carcasses—specifically post-battles. That's how carrion crows got their name, and that is why Jaehyun is referred to as such (for reasons I hopefully made relatively clear with this chapter—Avia are very reasonably associated in Syltris with death, Jaehyun is a crow Avia, hence). How does Yuta know Jaehyun's a crow and not a raven? It's all in the tail. Ravens have wedge tails. Crows have fan tails. There are also differences in the wings (four-"fingered" ravens vs five-"fingered" crows), but the tail is the biggest tell.</p><p>Did I miss anything?</p><p>
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        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. I Wish I Knew You Less</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>cw: one of them BEGINS to have a panic attack at the end, but the effects on the reader should be minor—just wanted to give a heads up!!</p><p>Also my end notes are too long so here (LMAO GOD), have one of my trivias in advance!<br/><br/><b>Salt!</b> Some of you are horse lovers, I’m sure, so this is a fun fact for anyone who wasn’t a horsechild (horsegirl/horseboy/horseperson/centaur). Salt is an essential component to a horse’s diet, and they need to consume a certain amount of salt each day in order to prevent early fatigue and weakness. It helps them retain water and encourages an appropriate amount of water intake. I haven’t gone into a lot of equine care in Wist, but please know Yuta and Jaehyun are doing what they need to do for their horses to the extent that they are able so that they can keep riding them until they arrive at Geran.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>They started sedating him at the age of eleven, because ten was when he was powerful enough to break their ribs, and they didn’t forget. He was still too young, they said, for other methods, but they miscalculated the dosage that year and left him sick for days, woozy and disoriented.</p>
  <p>Everything was loud, the noise debris stuck in his ears echoing and singing like stroked metal. But recovery wasn’t condoned. The sound of crystal shattering was its peak, redoubled by broken blood vessels across his cheek.  </p>
</div><hr/><p> </p><p>“Your stomach?” Jaehyun murmured from where they lay. “The scar.”</p><p>Yuta had been waiting for Jaehyun to initiate his side of the exchange. Jaehyun was quiet since admitting to the hearing boon—perhaps as an attempt to calm Yuta and make him feel less like was being intruded upon. It worked, but Yuta was still counting his own heartbeats where his ear was pressed against Jaehyun’s bicep. “Where?” Yuta breathed.</p><p>Jaehyun made an aborted motion—barely a twitch to pull back as if to look down in the shuttered darkness—but he stayed put and readjusted his arm where it rested around Yuta’s head. The nights would start going from chilly to cold soon, and the trapped heat between them would become invaluable rather than the catalyst for waking up drenched in condensation.</p><p>“Left . . . rib,” Jaehyun said, tentative.</p><p>Yuta didn’t manage to stop himself from laughing, a puffed exhale against Jaehyun’s neck. “The cluster? That was from shrapnel, kind of. You know.” It was one of those scars that looked almost cool until scrutinized for long enough. Only then was it ugly, mottled oddly by magic in the inorderly strikes against his skin. It had cauterized itself the second he’d received it—he could remember that much, though the year and age was fuzzy.</p><p>Seconds passed, the night breeze mouthing at the rough edges of the window in ways that seemed designed to make Yuta uneasy. His sleeping partner was distracting enough, but only barely.</p><p>Jaehyun sighed. That was it, that was all, but context made it remarkable.</p><p>“What?” Yuta mumbled even though holding a conversation like this was gently intolerable. He wanted to move or fiddle, and instead, if he so much as flexed his leg, he’d die instantly. Then again, it was tempting.</p><p>“Nothing.”</p><p>“You sighed.”</p><p>“I have lungs. I breathe.”</p><p>Yuta laughed, richer for the enjoyment of Jaehyun bickering with him, but this time, he moved. He curled his fingers where they held Jaehyun’s suspender, deeper under the hemp band. A sense of caution fizzled up his forearm as his nails dug into the feathers running down the small of Jaehyun’s back, just inches from the muscle of his tail. </p><p>Jaehyun went rigid, the Avia’s biceps tightening like a threatening noose. His inhale was sharp, the feathers against Yuta’s fingertips fluffing as if Jaehyun had bitten down on a shiver and was keeping it clenched around his midsection. A careful thrill stung across Yuta’s palm, a curious energy prickling at his fingertips.</p><p>Yuta’s inciting motion hadn’t been too deliberate, but he couldn’t claim it to be completely unintentional. The contour feathers he’d reached were softer like he’d expected them to be, running with his fingers, flexible and small. Under them were the even softer semiplume feathers, deeply warm and gentle.</p><p> If Yuta nestled closer into Jaehyun’s hold, perhaps he’d be able to hear Jaehyun’s heart beating, too. Pounding.</p><p>He could feel Jaehyun’s breath against his hair, a tight exhale through his nose brushing up against the loose hairs of his braid.</p><p>Yuta relaxed his fingers. “Easy,” he murmured. “I’m just teasing.”</p><p>Jaehyun didn’t respond, but the words didn’t seem to remotely soothe him, either. Jaehyun’s reaction had been intense and wasn’t easing, but Yuta thought that maybe part of it was that Jaehyun hadn’t meant to react at all.</p><p>Slowly, Yuta released the suspender in his grip, then carefully, carefully slid his fingers beneath it.</p><p>He wasn’t trying to tease, this time.</p><p>He smoothed his thumb against the soft edges of the feathers down Jaehyun’s spine, then gently ran the back of his nails across and to the side, toward the downy edges where the contour feathers grew sparse and small. </p><p>Every feather seemed to react, raised to skim against the skin of Yuta’s palm as he passed them. He stopped when he reached plain, smooth skin. The muscle there jumped.</p><p>That first night where Yuta had slipped under Jaehyun’s shirt to clutch his suspender had been the position they’d gotten used to for a reason. It was one more assurance that Jaehyun wouldn’t slip away.</p><p>He could have removed his hand out from its position entirely and rested it over Jaehyun’s shirt, but that wasn’t ideal, and he didn’t want Jaehyun to feel threatened by the possibility of Yuta really touching him.</p><p>That was hypothetically rectified by confirming Jaehyun’s tension in an escalated fashion—getting it over with, making it no longer a threat through reality.</p><p>Fears, phobias, traumas were resolved quickly this way.</p><p>“That’s it,” Yuta promised. “That’s all.”</p><p>The tiniest tremor passed through Jaehyun. Just once. A pulse of his fingers, a shake in his inhale, and Yuta wasn’t sure whether he was trying to relax his fear or fury.</p><p>They often looked the same.</p><p>His skin was very warm against Yuta’s fingertips regardless.</p><p>Gradually, Jaehyun unwound.</p><p>Yuta failed to fall asleep until then.</p>
<hr/><p>He awoke with a jolt, sudden and shaken. He gasped through his nose, body seizing as Jaehyun moved. For a moment, it was Jaehyun’s body against his, and then his arms on either side of his head as Yuta lay on his back and Jaehyun’s elbow dug into his braid against the mat.</p><p>The world spun black as Yuta surged up in resistance, his grip jolting for purchase against Jaehyun’s hip to draw his captive rondel.</p><p>He found the handle just as Jaehyun’s arm came off his braid and down on his chest. Jaehyun’s forearm shoved against his sternum and forced Yuta’s spine to hit the mat, the wind jostling out between his teeth. Jaehyun held him there, fingers spread across his chest as Yuta’s fingertips tipped around the rondel’s flat pommel.</p><p>But Jaehyun wasn’t even looking at him.</p><p>The window creaked, doubled by the sound of the clasps unhooking from each other, metal against metal. Moonlight spilled across Jaehyun’s profile in a blue and silver outline, his eyes flashing and narrowing in the new light.</p><p>Even under threat of a figure frozen partway through the window, aborted in the act of pulling themselves into the room, Yuta’s mind correctly registered Jaehyun as beautiful.</p><p>Especially beautiful, maybe, when his expression was hostile. He loomed huge above Yuta, wings arced in a perfect heave, feathers catching the moon in shingles of silver. He showed his teeth to the shadow paralyzed at the sill, his nose whiskering from the start of a snarl and his jaw sharp from the cast of shadow.</p><p><em> “Get out,” </em>he growled in gravel and a deep, ruined stone. The figure choked, the shutters jostling as they scrambled. The shrubbery outside the window made a racket across their limbs, and then there was a thud, the sound of dirt and rocks, and the unmistakable sound of a retreat.</p><p>Jaehyun’s eyes stayed steady on the gap as he breathed through his nose, head tilted and snarl slowly fading.</p><p>After a time, Yuta could hear nothing at all as the heat left his body from the bite of cold. He dropped his hand from his rondel, relaxing back. Yuta was sure that someone more dangerous wouldn’t have run at the mere sight of an Avia’s teeth and wings. This village was incredibly nosy. It was probably some kid who didn’t take the warnings about Avian hearing seriously and liked to stick their hands in other people’s business.</p><p>Yuta did not feel threatened.</p><p>“You don’t have to protect me,” Yuta said at length, and Jaehyun startled with a jolt of muscle, then blinked his big, dark eyes down at Yuta from half an arm’s length above him. His feathers smoothed down second by second until he went from looking like someone had stabbed him in the animal instincts to bewildered and exhausted instead.</p><p>He removed his hand from Yuta’s chest, letting Yuta’s blood rush back to his skin and tingle at the absence, then clambered to his feet toward the window.</p><p>Under Jaehyun’s fumbling fingers, the shutter closed with an ungraceful clatter. Jaehyun paused there and seemed to straighten his shirt in the darkness. Yuta could hear him take a breath.</p><p>“Just come lie down,” Yuta muttered. “I don’t want to fall asleep in the saddle again.”</p><p>Jaehyun obeyed. He probably did his best to be careful, but he did knock Yuta’s hip. Something was off about him—perhaps uprooted and unsteady or unhappy to be awake and disoriented by the intrusion. Yuta could hardly read him like a book. Especially with no light to read him by.</p><p>But the searching touches Jaehyun was making in order to not knee Yuta in the stomach made Yuta feel uneasy. They were too clumsy and gentle and left tingles crawling over his skin like the itch of hayfever.</p><p>He pulled Jaehyun down and slid into him, getting it over with: his fingers through Jaehyun’s feathers, his thigh between Jaehyun’s, his other hand at the crook of Jaehyun’s waist, and his head against Jaehyun’s bicep. He was closer this time through impatient accident alone, but it shut out the cold with efficiency.</p><p>He closed his eyes under Jaehyun’s wing and didn’t wait for Jaehyun to relax or steady before he fell asleep.</p>
<hr/><p>The second time waking wasn’t much better. </p><p>Jaehyun snapped him from unconsciousness with the smallest movement of his fingers where they grazed his crown, and Yuta had to catch his breath centimeters from Jaehyun’s chest as the sound of a crack and rattle cleared from his skull.</p><p>For the first time, they lay there past waking, Yuta trying to resist the inborn urge to stroke his thumb against the feathers under his touch. They were soft.</p><p>And Yuta didn’t want to be awake, or asleep again with memories pinging around his head, or be anything at all.</p><p>Sometimes it happened like that.</p><p>He sank his cheek against Jaehyun’s arm and kept his eyes squeezed closed across the invasive splash of light digging through the cracks in the shutters. Jaehyun’s feathers were sticking to his palm from the soft dampness of over-warmth and continuous proximity. Again, every bit of Jaehyun pressed up against Yuta made him feel like something different was being carved out of him, pressing a map into his skin to be memorized.</p><p>The cavity inside his chest was filled with watery ash, pressing and sinking with lethargic touches against his ribs. It was a mess, and he was never sure why it chose to dredge up certain times and not others.</p><p>Slowly, after minutes of being awake and regretting the over-complicated state of existence, Yuta pressed his mouth to Jaehyun’s sleep-wrinkled sleeve that had dug lines into his face. He took an inhale through his entire body, starting with his nose, working down his spine, trying to wheedle out an energy to live.</p><p>Jaehyun smelled of sweat and sleep and oil, again and again, and no longer invasive.</p><p>Yuta wasn’t sure what spurred it, but out of the light-riddled space Yuta refused to open his eyes to, Jaehyun said, “Good morning.” And it sounded awful—hoarse and almost painful. Yuta wondered which stroke of existence decided it was a fair thing to make Jaehyun’s most obvious flaw his terrible morning state.</p><p>That voice had an alarming duality, but it had roughly the same effect either way.</p><p>Yuta found a laugh somewhere beneath the smog, fought another innate urge, and forced himself to pull out from Jaehyun’s arms with limbs that felt like their bones were flaking in oxidized scales—too cool to be hit with a hammer without breaking. </p><p>He didn’t like mornings like these.</p><p>“Good morning,” he returned anyway and watched as Jaehyun lifted himself to his knees and ran his hands over his face with a shudder, feathers fluffing and smoothing again in a ripple.</p><p>Yuta didn’t think this is what he’d meant for himself when he'd forced his way into an adventure. Mundane, unpleasant mornings where a very stiff, dangerous, and reticent Avia seemed oddly alright with not only having him, but holding him past due.</p><p>Mother forbid he scratch his feathers, though, which Yuta would be doing again.</p><p>It was in his brain now, settled over a more unsettling thought, protecting its dignity with dark tourmaline wings.</p>
<hr/><p>The talking was bare to none, but as he had been to varying degrees since the start, Yuta was comfortable with it. The only distinction from other mostly-silent days was that Yuta asked for Jaehyun’s book, and Jaehyun gave it to him.</p><p>Yuta was no more moved by it than he had been the first time, but it gave his brain something to do, his inner thoughts shaping the image of Jaehyun memorizing this dull and unrelatable plea, somehow.</p><p>“Can you recite it to me?” Yuta had asked eventually.</p><p>“If you want,” said Jaehyun, and Yuta hummed in thought at the temptation. Jaehyun’s voice, at that moment, was somewhere between hoarse and resonant, not quite smooth. He cleared his throat after speaking and shifted in his saddle.</p><p>Yuta let him be.</p><p>But now it was evening, less than one day from the city Samgan and hours from a main road, and there was still time before twilight hit.</p><p>Moments after watering and tethering the horses, Yuta again offered both swords and Jaehyun again chose the curved blade. The heat of the day was still heavy, though reducing, and if after sparring, they didn’t wash by the river that would soon split from their journey, Yuta would walk out of his own body. The number of water refills he’d gone through against the mortifying ordeal of wondering if Jaehyun could hear him piss was tempered by the amount of sweat dampening his shirt like he’d walked through a sauna.</p><p>The summer months of southern Syltris really were a treat, even late, but this was home.</p><p>And frankly, Jaehyun looked worse, his shirt sticking to his upper chest and shoulders in half-dried, salty patches that could have sated any horse’s sodium requirements.</p><p>The night would be very cold.</p><p>Yuta adjusted his grip on the bangkung and engaged.</p><p>It was roughly the same. Again, the clearing they’d found was substantial enough for Jaehyun to spread his wings. Like before, Jaehyun wasn’t using them.</p><p>“There’s room,” Yuta reminded him minutes into a light exchange.</p><p>Jaehyun cocked his head, eyes steadying on Yuta’s gaze during the pause.</p><p>“Your wings,” Yuta clarified, using the tip of his sword to indicate, though he was nowhere near touching them.</p><p>Jaehyun’s mouth tightened. He reached up to smooth his hair back into place with his free hand. “We’re sparring,” Jaehyun said after a moment, “not fighting.”</p><p>“How often do you get to spread your wings, though?” Yuta pressed, recalling the tweak in Jaehyun’s expression back in Monic when he’d stretched them out in their room. “I can handle it.”</p><p>Jaehyun’s dimples made a show of themselves for the first time in a while, his wings shuffling. Without responding, Jaehyun struck out again, wings still tucked, and frustration started to wind up between Yuta’s lungs.</p><p>He parried Jaehyun, but it was nothing—wouldn’t have even fussed his left shoulder, which was recovering from the climb and rain with agonizing slowness, if he’d been using his non-dominant hand.</p><p>Yuta adjusted his grip and struck toward Jaehyun’s upper left side, putting a lesser weight into the attack so that when Jaehyun dodged him—he sidestepped, tilting his shoulder back and away from the attack—Yuta could re-angle, step forward, and try to catch Jaehyun at a more vulnerable approach, swinging faster than he had been for the entirety of the spar so far.</p><p>Jaehyun, unable to parry that effectively, stepped back just fast enough with something almost like a flinch. He turned his eyes on Yuta with a hard glance, then pivoted to deflect the attack Yuta again aimed upward, ducking his head back with a steadying expression of discomfort.</p><p>The space between his eyebrows creased next as again Yuta attacked at an accelerated pace than what the situation called for, but it wasn’t like Jaehyun hadn’t been given enough context to understand the intention.</p><p>Yuta struck again, thrusting at Jaehyun’s stomach and forcing Jaehyun to adjust with more power to try and counter a speed he couldn’t match.</p><p>“C’mon, darling,” slid out of Yuta’s mouth like something foreign, and Jaehyun’s next block was wobbly. “Stretch.”</p><p>The red in Jaehyun’s ears was a warning, the dig of his dimples deeper. Yuta was sure Jaehyun could usually handle him without spreading his wings—he’d done so in Prinks and again the first time they’d sparred—but Yuta also hadn’t been trying to kill him then.</p><p>Yuta was trying to, now, and doing so with confidence, because Jaehyun would not let Yuta kill him. That would be ridiculous. </p><p>Yuta cut for his neck, then slid away from Jaehyun’s block and let him overbalance just enough to make him suck in a breath when Yuta went for his thigh—the one, so long ago, that had been bandaged in a court overflowing with wine.</p><p>Jaehyun’s wings flooded out with a billow and a strained, concerning hiss through Jaehyun’s teeth that made something inside of Yuta lurch. Yuta almost faltered. He almost drew breath in a gasp as Jaehyun’s wings cut through the late day and glossed with a subtle, green-sepia luster.</p><p>Yuta swung, Jaehyun met him, and the Avia <em> pushed. </em> </p><p>Yuta managed not to stagger by the skin of his teeth, but being on the defensive was his only option for the next ten exchanges, the next dozen or so steps taken to not die, and the thrill, the exhilaration, the adrenaline—all of it clashed badly with that single second of breath that had sounded like pain. It tugged in Yuta’s chest like a broken puppet string trying to budge an arm.</p><p>It would have to hurt for Jaehyun not to use his wings for too long—this would be like walking for the first time after sitting in roughly the same position for three days. </p><p>But even with a three-day rust, Jaehyun had not forgotten how to use them.</p><p>In a different situation, Yuta should have felt threatened, but instead he was worried about the wrong fucking thing and elated about all the right ones. Jaehyun had speed and power like this, a sort of maneuverability and ability that was obviously inhuman.</p><p>The edge of Jaehyun’s blade scraped down the cloth of Yuta’s upper arm at just the right angle to not leave a single cut or scratch, and that was what was making Yuta’s heart do its best to slam out of his ribcage.</p><p>The precision with which Jaehyun was tempering his blows felt like Yuta was getting caressed, and his brain was devolving into mud and instinct.</p><p>Jaehyun struck, Yuta dodged, then parried, then did the same again, and again, because getting an attack in was difficult. He managed a few, but one was at the expense of a tap to his waist that had him gasping. Every minute push and drag of Jaehyun’s wings as they twitched out or folded in or cupped the air gave him more distance and Yuta less warning—just an extended movement of black against the sun-setting colors of late summer trees and ground made a little trickier for its rugged naturalness. </p><p>A decent amount of Yuta’s attention was occupied by not injuring himself just working against Jaehyun’s attacks. The spare moments he could drag his eyes away from the tip of Jaehyun’s sword, his shoulders, or his hips to look at his face were imprecise and dangerous.</p><p>Beautiful though.</p><p>The tap to Yuta’s chin—just under, just enough to really hurt him if Jaehyun slid forward one millimeter of Yuta faltered—defeated him.</p><p>“Stop,” Yuta gasped after taking another step back and blinking away the stars of almost dying. Of being kissed there by a shoddy, shitty sword.</p><p>And Jaehyun did without resistance or complaint, lowering his bangkung and folding his wings in, locked away once more. He was exhibiting the effects of putting in effort, which at least palliated Yuta’s own condition.</p><p>“Shit,” Yuta said, because he had no words beside it. He was trying not to breathe as hard as he wanted to or to be as fatigued as he was by a fight that went harder for longer than he was regularly accustomed. Fatigue was backburner to how endorphins pounded through him like fresh water splashing inside his skin. “Fuck.” He laughed, tipping at the waist to regain his head and breath.</p><p>More words almost slipped out of his mouth, but he held them and let them burn against the sweat prickling at his skin and calling for hydration. When he looked up, Jaehyun was staring at him unabashed as sweat slid from his hairline, his gaze so focused as to be . . . something else. Something—no.</p><p>“Jaehyun,” Yuta said after a moment when he was sure he’d no longer sound pathetically defeated, “please stretch.” There was mirth caught up in his words, but Yuta meant it seriously, and Jaehyun’s mouth tucked into that stubborn kind of reticence Yuta was finding he liked.</p><p>Yuta’s body tingled obsessively where Jaehyun had touched him, his skin processing on its own schedule how many times Jaehyun could have made him bleed and didn’t. The scab under Yuta’s eye was long gone, but Yuta’s head was spinning.</p><p>“Go wash,” Yuta said, holding his hand out for Jaehyun’s sword, “and stretch. I’ll go after you.” When Jaehyun handed his bangkung over, Yuta didn’t avoid his fingers even though it sent a frisson through his nerves.</p><p>Finally, Jaehyun nodded, though Yuta couldn’t know what the hesitation was for. As Jaehyun was collecting his things, Yuta added, “Fly, if you want. We’re still miles out and neither of us are going anywhere. I have the pin and you have my dagger.”</p><p>Though in all honesty, the rondel was slipping from Yuta’s grasp as something he owned. It belonged to Jaehyun, in a way.</p><p>It was an odd, odd thing.</p><p>But he did want it back, if only because he was short of a significant and well-crafted weapon.</p><p>Jaehyun’s expression in response to Yuta’s addendum appeared almost grudging, but Jaehyun left, and Yuta was alone.</p><p>For a moment, all he did was tip his head back and breathe, feeling the sweat at the back of his neck collect in the wrinkle. His blood was slowing, but felt thick and rich like mulled wine.</p><p>Dueling an Avia was one way to drag himself out of a slump by the hands and heels, but it was awkward to know he’d woken up like half a person just that morning when he was feeling so alive, now.</p><p>On top of that, if he’d been a less experienced swordsman with all of the hangups he had now, his blood would have rushed to only one place during that fight, and the fact that he got out of it unscathed was something to be grateful for.</p><p>Unscathed was relative, though.</p>
<hr/><p>They traded off, and the sky was hitting twilight by the time Yuta was clean and chilled from his teeth and hair to his toes. He squeezed water from his braid, surrounded by strung-up clothes while Jaehyun fixed himself food. The pink nip of cold was fading from Jaehyun’s face and hands, but his movements were still slow.</p><p>Yuta had made Jaehyun self-conscious, perhaps, by watching him so attentively while he’d eaten in Dusong, so Jaehyun was turned from him at an angle, now, as he picked over dried fruit, vegetables, and the rice wafers he was very meticulously trying to keep from leaving little bits everywhere. They’d both wordlessly accepted a default of “no fires” from the start—Yuta was in the practice of never lighting one unless necessary. Wood in southern Syltris let off smoke like almost nothing else, and bandits were already a risk even without sending up signals.</p><p>“I have my question,” Yuta said, and Jaehyun took a swig from his waterskin as discreetly as possible, as if nervous. But he nodded, so Yuta continued, “How do you know Geran attacked Ker?”</p><p>The waiting time for Jaehyun to formulate an answer began with Jaehyun fiddling with his sleeves where they were folded up his elbows, then ended with him looking at a space roughly between them.</p><p>“I was there,” he said, and it was as if everything in Yuta’s brain and body paused. Held itself. The rush of thoughts that followed made Yuta’s tongue sting.</p><p>“Where?”</p><p>Jaehyun shook his head, and Yuta’s thoughts clinched.</p><p>“You wouldn’t shake your head if you weren’t in Ienkra, Jaehyun,” Yuta said, and the quake in his hands found him before he could suppress it. His words were too sharp, too low, and he was one second from standing when Jaehyun said, “Both.”</p><p>“What?” Yuta asked, curt.</p><p>Jaehyun raised his eyes from the ground to Yuta’s, expression wiped. “I was in both.”</p><p>
  <em> “What?” </em>
</p><p>“There was magic involved,” Jaehyun said, his voice verging on something measured and placating, and Yuta was trying to get a grip on the blurry edges of his vision. “I was in one, and then the other.”</p><p>Magic was a bastard of reason Yuta only loosely understood. As soon as it was captured outside of an Avia’s body, Yuta no longer had a grasp on it, so he had to let that one go. But there were other things unraveling in his mind, and Yuta’s grip on himself was slipping. “Which were you in first?”</p><p>“It wouldn’t matter to you, would it?” Jaehyun said, and though he said them calmly, it still felt backhanded. Yuta recoiled from him, and finally Jaehyun’s face registered an emotion—Yuta was too frazzled to parse it. “I was in Ienkra first, Yuta. Then Syltris. I’ve been here ever since. I was twenty-one, and it’s been eleven years. I was never on their side during the war.”</p><p>Yuta inhaled in the dying light, then let out a breath that held too much, said too much.</p><p>Being overwhelmed was an utterly inappropriate reaction, but he was, and so he stood. Jaehyun watched as he did so.</p><p>Yuta swallowed two more breaths, resisted the urge to do something rash, and instead turned and walked off as the beginnings of a panic attack hit.</p><p>And Jaehyun let him leave.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="big"><span class="u">Trivia:</span></span><br/><b>Hammerscale!</b> Did you see that bit where Yuta mentioned “oxidized scales”? As a blacksmith, he was referring to hammerscale—the flakey kind and not something like spheroidal hammerscale, which is produced through bloomsmithing (a smithing stage China skipped completely!). Essentially, when heated iron is introduced to oxygen, its changed microstructure reacts and forms a layer of iron oxide. This tends to flake off when the iron is hammered, but it’s dangerous and aesthetically messes with the end result, so smiths will brush it off before, throughout, and after the hammering process. They have to be careful and wear appropriate gear or hammerscale will stick to their skin and burn them.</p><p><b>Suspenders!</b>  Jaehyun uses X-back suspenders (for obvious reasons, methinks), but I will say that suspenders are 100% a fashion development that formed in the West—the first appearance is traced back to 18th century France. I’ve been following the more traditional (Western) regard for suspenders that states they’re undergarments, and allowing them to be visible is somewhat, if not blatantly, risqué. Please note that Jaehyun only tucks in the front of his shirt, and he only does it minimally. Because he wears them as undergarments, of a sort, he cannot effectively tuck in his shirt. Additionally, his suspenders are not elastic. Elastic was an 1800s thing and I’m picking and choosing which eras I care about.</p><p><b>Braces!</b> Why is this a separate section? I didn’t want the suspenders section to keep going. All braces are suspenders, and in some places in the world, the word is synonymous with suspenders. Not all suspenders are braces, though! Generally, braces are regarded to be suspenders that are attached at the waist with buttons. With suspenders, it doesn’t matter how you attach them so long as they are a style accessory that attaches at the waist and slips over each shoulder to help hold the pants in place. I haven’t decided <em>precisely</em> what Jaehyun’s suspenders look like, but I sure as hell know he’s not using buttons. Something about that arrangement makes him disagreeable.</p><p><b>Cotton vs hemp!</b> Southeast Asia introduced cotton-growing to China during the Tang dynasty (618–907), though there are records that dispute that claim, stating that cotton-growing has been practiced in China since prehistoric times. I am no expert and cannot get into the nitty-gritty. Regardless, at the end of Korea’s Goryeo dynasty (918–1392), cotton seeds were brought to Korea from China during China’s Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Cotton replaced hemp in Japan around the 16th century. This is all to say: cotton’s been around for a while in Asia. Most common people wore materials made from hemp, though. There could have been many reasons for this—not least of these being it’s more durable and antibacterial, even if it’s less flexible and much darker. Hemp’s also been around for much longer in both China (stone age) and Korea (pre-A.D.). For an undergarment, it makes far more sense for Jaehyun to have suspenders made of hemp.</p><p><b>Semiplume and Contour Feathers!</b> There are so many feathers, guys, so I’ll try to take it one step at a time. Semiplumes hide underneath contour feathers, providing insulation and warmth. They have a developed rachis (that hard, central bit to a feather), but their barbules have no hooks—essentially, these feathers don’t “zip”—which makes them very fluffy and do their job well. Contour feathers, on the other hand <em>do</em> have hooks past midway up the rachis, and therefore do zip. Their tips are waterproof and they fit over each other like shingles over a bird’s (or Avia’s!) body, aiding with streamlining and general aesthetics. The barbules at their base do not have hooks and are, once again, fluffy. Contour feathers on the wings are called “coverts.” <em>Jaehyun</em> has all of this running down his back (along with other feathers like down and filoplumes) between his wings.</p><p><b>Smoke!</b> This one’s simple, but in case it’s an unknown: the wetter the wood, the more smoke it gives off. Southern Syltris is a temperate climate leaning slightly more tropical, or humid continental, if you will (keep in mind I am not a climatologist), so its flora tends to be not very dry at all even when it hasn’t rained for a bit. So even though the temperatures in that region are fairly extreme, travelers as wary as Yuta and Jaehyun will attempt to keep the fires to a minimum.</p><p>
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        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Repeat the Action Until It's Sore and Worn</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>cw: panic attack cont. but I think it should be controlled enough to manage!</p>
<p>And my ending trivia isn't too long, but you do need to know this one now instead of later, so here:</p>
<p><b>Pin feathers!</b> Alternatively: blood feathers. These are developing feathers. Adult crows molt every summer, and I've elected to make that <em>early</em> summer for Jaehyun because I can. It takes 6–8 weeks after molting for the feathers to grow back fully, and in the meantime, you'll get pin feathers, which are basically new, baby feathers! In order to grow, they have a blood supply and are encased in a keratin coating—this will get preened off as the feather matures. Pin feathers are sensitive and bleed heavily when damaged or cut. To remedy the issue, they can be plucked (though they can stop on their own).</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p> </p>
  <p> </p>
  <p> </p>
  <p>
    <span>Every year, mid-summer: the Ienkran trees were such a deep green they were almost blue, crowding the skylight like frothing bubbles at the edges of its domed glass.</span>
  </p>
  <p>
    <span>There was a ceremony of it in that tile and glass building—just a singular, circular floor, two open entryways like a sequestered pavilion as the trees shook with hot winds off the central plains he knew existed but had never seen—where he would lay outstretched and watch songbirds flit like blinks across the blue.</span>
  </p>
  <p>
    <span>It didn’t hurt, because his feathers didn’t have nerves.</span>
  </p>
  <p>
    <span>Most of them didn’t.</span>
  </p>
  <p>
    <span>Not the grown ones.</span>
  </p>
  <p>
    <span>But the hurt started with a yearning, with a beg crawling up the underside of his breastbone until docile ritual turned into shallow, shuddered breaths into the air and the instinct not to flinch mitigated by how much concentration it took not to cry. Hearing every, tiny caress of severed rachides scraping the tile, the lukewarm stone under the scratch of his fingernails every time he curled and uncurled his hands.</span>
  </p>
  <p>
    <span>And he’d been ten when a pin feather got snipped.</span>
  </p>
  <p>
    <span>He’d never felt pain like that. It gripped him by the gut and ripped him.</span>
  </p>
  <p>
    <span>Age ten.</span>
  </p>
  <p>
    <span>Ten when he’d screamed something inhuman and afraid and drew everything up from his thighs and struck the one with the little silver clippers. Blood slung across the tile from his overturned wing, an arc of crimson that made him stagger, vision flashing, pain cracking across his second wrist.</span>
  </p>
  <p>
    <span>He was drawn back by the throat with a whispered threat sliding into his ear.</span>
  </p>
</div><hr/>
<p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta unsheathed his back knife at the fifth tree from their camp and cut into its flaky bark, through to the orange undertone turning gray in the dark. His hands were shaking. He kept moving, cutting into every tree to his right, now—some of their barks papery and flaking or smooth and scarred.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He dropped to the ground at the thirteenth cut where the dark was threatening to be unmanageable, dug the point of his knife into the earth, settled his forehead on the pommel, and tried to breathe.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Even as the whole world was falling asleep, his mind was a mess of sound, repeats and rebounds and echoes so familiar and intimate he could taste how they’d felt the first time. A touch, an ache in his arm and his leg, digging into the tightness in his throat, a rattle.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta forced himself to struggle through an exhale.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He couldn’t think straight with Jaehyun around him. He was used to being alone. To rolling with the punches as they came instead of staving paranoia off and shoving warnings aside until the plain admittance that his traveling companion could have been the magic touch behind his nightmares pulled him under.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eleven years wasn’t back far enough. It had been fifteen years since the war had started.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta let his mind shut down, unravel his mess, and pick at the pieces, running his mental fingers along the threads until the repetition forced his brain to shut up. To stop reminding him of a life he’d lived over hundreds of times when he’d only ever wanted to experience each horror once, if ever.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun was “never on their side during the war,” he’d said.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>That could mean anything. It could be terribly empty, because it certainly couldn’t be literal. He’d been on the Ienkran side of the border—that was true if the numbers were true.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Why did Yuta care?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He dragged in an awful breath.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>At twenty-seven, after eight years of war, Yuta had found himself roped back into Isdril and its rickety bones. As blood still spilled at the border, Isdril needed to rebuild itself enough to be a late-war hub. He was their blacksmith. As the last two years bled Syltris dry, he made hundreds of weapons with nicked-up hands that had stolen keys and lives and food, dug graves out of the battle-sodden earth, and lifted memories out of the cracked windpipes of destroyed houses and bodies.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There were people he knew who had survived the attacks still living in Isdril, and if it weren’t for his hair, they wouldn’t have recognized him. He knew this because all the times he kept it up under a sash, their eyes, if he saw them, passed over him like he was a stranger in the corner of a room.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And when they did see him, did recognize him, there was a terrifying moment of unknown, of fiddling with courtesy and positive memories between confusion, condolences, shared grief, and a baffling reluctance to name the losses.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He’d been stared at by a woman who had once given him plums for juices and pickling, weighed him down with a basket half his size, called him a small ghost, and now he’d become one. And she’d stared, and he had stared back because there was nothing else to do with his work finished for the day, and then he could no longer breathe as the forge burned down his back and she stared, and stared, older than ever, and he stood before her, shaped out of things that had killed him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Isdril did not rebuild the same.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was a blessing and a curse. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He would have died in that city to walk those same streets and be too grown and too scarred to fit into his own memories. But knowing it was his home, yet nothing like it, was also intolerable.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His partner had been livid when he left because she swore he could heal if he weren’t so afraid, but she didn’t understand.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The house on the hill—his house, his home—was lived in by the time he’d returned. Two women and their children on a single floor, the second shaved clear off and the first rebuilt to sustain itself. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The graves had been mistaken for rubble.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He couldn’t do it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When the war was over, he left.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And now after five years, he’d walked into a messy, messy thing. A perfect concoction. Ienkran, complicit, foreign, similar, refugee, outcast, patient, capable, lethal.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And he cared, as his being was wont to do.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta made a pathetic noise against the fingers he’d knotted between his teeth, raking his mind through his skin to process the touches he hadn’t known for sure had been an enemy’s but now knew could be.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He clawed through every breath. Deep, then deeper.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Most of Ienkra’s attack power had come from magic, employed in methods Syltris had never seen. Yuta knew from his time with the witchsmith that Avian magic was a particular, finite thing that required massive amounts of what she called “stripping and molding” to move beyond small enhancements and adjustments—even then, the magic was potent and powerful, but not wild.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When he had asked what it was the Ienkrans were doing that could rip whole cities to shreds, her lips sealed and spoke nothing more. It was likely for the better that she hadn’t told him. His work suffered when his mind tunneled.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Over the course of the war, the magic attacks flagged and became weaker, more rare until the last year had held nothing but charms, but the first four years at least had gone strong.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t know,” he found the words to say, painful and heavy, all into empty, dark air where the moon and the stars were cut out by the canopy and a gathering cloud cover, and he could almost see nothing at all.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>At least if he bellowed, Jaehyun would hear him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He yanked his knife out of the earth, stood, and staggered. He’d undercalculated how the shock had hit his body, his lungs reeling from the tail end of panic and his leg telling him to fuck off and die already as pain leaked its way through his jaw. Yuta unstuck his molars from each other, wincing from it, and felt the release radiate through his skull.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He took his last steadying breaths, struggling to stay grounded, and walked backwards with his right arm loosely outstretched until he hit a tree. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Squinting, he felt over its bark until he was sure it was one of his, then pivoted carefully to retrace his exact direction, allowing himself no more time to adjust. He kept his left arm outstretched, forcing himself to take the trek back as loose bark whispered under his fingertips.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lying in the weeds and dirt for an entire night wasn’t an option, neither did he want it. He wanted his brain to stop rattling and to stop rolling his intimacies through his thoughts in nausea.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But it took time to walk carefully in a landscape barely outlined and with such little depth. His priority was not getting lost, not breaking a leg, and maintaining the distinct sense that his life was a shitstorm and he was living in it, and that’s just the way it was.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>At some point, the cuts system dropped off and he could see the trees peter out for the sparse clearing Jaehyun and he had made theirs.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He paused and listened, trying to isolate the stray sound of horses or wings or even the mild breeze disturbing Jaehyun’s clothesline bell, but hearing nothing. He would have settled on seeing the way the feeble glow of the covered moon bounced off the carapaces of Jaehyun’s feathers, but everything was so gray and indefinite, he was at a loss.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Holding his knife with a caution he felt necessary, he stepped past the last trees before the mottled sky opened up, scanning for the horses (asleep), then the bedrolls (left), then Jaehyun. His stomach lurched with the sound of a sudden breath taken behind him from the right side—a slow, deciding inhale—and he turned on Jaehyun after taking three steps away.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The Avia had his arms crossed, a few strands of his hair striping down the skin of his face as its sufficient paleness survived the darkness. The tree at his back was not the one acting as their clothesline, this one broad enough to hide him until Yuta had been several steps ahead from a couple trees aside.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You’re very quiet,” Yuta said, almost dully, and Jaehyun said with a voice running deep with amber and moonlight, “You’re not.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s my heart, isn’t it,” Yuta let himself blurt, almost managing to tease if it weren’t for the harsh, defensive edge, and Jaehyun shoved himself from the tree at his back, dropping his hands.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I think everything’s loud,” Jaehyun murmured, “comparatively.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun wasn’t showing any tension or aggression, and the part of Yuta that had learned to trust him wanted to put his knife away. He fiddled with the metal finger groove, rubbing his thumbnail across the edge.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I need to ask you a question, but I can’t fight you for it,” Yuta said as Jaehyun kept his distance, respecting the steps Yuta had put between them, but not turning his back as he circled around to the tree that scooped its branches over their spread out bedrolls.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You don’t seem to like my answers,” Jaehyun said, and it was plain, incredibly bereft of anything at all aside from his timbre as he was backdropped by the cream of his drying shirt. “I’ll try to be satisfactory.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“The war started before you left Ienkra.” A bolder breeze mouthed at the cuff of Yuta’s sleeve and nudged the small, fine hairs that never stayed in his braid. His hair was still wet, the damp spot between his shoulders chilling uncomfortably. “I need to know what you meant when you said you weren’t on their side.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I was not,” Jaehyun began slowly, definitely, “and am not loyal to Ienkra. You asked if I am Ienkran. I am not by blood, affection, or obligation.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You were there.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“For most of my life.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta stared at what the darkness made of Jaehyun’s features: gray and black, no luster, no blush, no regality, just wings and a body and a face.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>That answer should have categorically unsettled Yuta, but Jaehyun was being unmoving, voice and body language consistent across everything. Confirming, secure.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Still, Yuta could not close the distance.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Your magic could have been what murdered so many of my people.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I could have been a part of it,” Jaehyun admitted, words sliding under the breeze and down low across the ground. “No offense to your people, but the Ienkrans I very certainly and purposefully killed were far more personal.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A laugh fought out of Yuta that was ugly and strangled. An act of violence fluttered behind his eyelids as he closed them, benumbed. He let out a breath, then took it back in, and opened his eyes to the prickling darkness and pale shapes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>More questions clung to the roof of his mouth like dead things scraping his palate. He swallowed them down and took a step forward. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun could have contributed, but it wasn’t personal.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Complicity, intent, control, choice.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Under all the bland blankness of Jaehyun’s voice had been bitter words. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta closed the rest of the space, too close, an unnameable emotion tugging at his mouth and tongue and teeth. Jaehyun looked down at him from his slight height advantage with an unpleasant veil of passivity.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta studied that face and saw it from the personal Ienkran deaths it had meditated and born witness to. He looked at his eyelashes, his cheeks that hid dimples, his soft philtrum, then recalled far down to Jaehyun’s flank where a scar dug deep into his skin.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“How many scars do I owe you?” Yuta asked, a messy, tangled repulsion putting pressure on his chest but failing to make him move. He wouldn’t be challenging Jaehyun for honor or slinging words down his face. War didn’t use words. It bled out and died. “How many?” he repeated when Jaehyun didn’t so much as move his lips.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“At least a single very unpleasant one,” Jaehyun said, clipped and muted and dark, quieter now that Yuta was closer but absent of warmth. “Maybe one you’ve already told me about, but reiterated and deeper.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The laugh those words claimed from Yuta was worse. It was almost like a gag. Yuta felt violence try to cling to him. It hurt in his hands, digging into his palms and up through his wrists like injuries sliding home.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It wasn’t personal.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun wasn’t Ienkran.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Get over it, leave it, leave it, </span>
  <em>
    <span>let this one die.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun was </span>
  <em>
    <span>telling</span>
  </em>
  <span> him he had no willful part in Yuta’s trauma, and Yuta could not try to kill Jaehyun over the shambles inside his head that would never find peace.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta dragged in a breath that pained him. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And put his knife away.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s expression didn’t change and neither did his stance. He stood there, perfectly still aside from his eyes, trained on Yuta’s, tracing between them slowly with a blank unrepentance.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When Yuta reached his fingers up to tilt them against Jaehyun’s sternum, slowly enough that Jaehyun couldn’t interpret him as preparing to choke him, and pushed, Jaehyun let himself be moved. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His shirt passed over his head and forced Yuta to weave to avoid it. With one last long, silent study of Yuta’s face, Jaehyun slowly dropped to his knees on the paralleled bedrolls and shrugged his shoulders back with a rustle of feathers.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun did not lower his eyes from Yuta’s face, neck given mercy by the two feet now between them, but the position still gnawed down Yuta’s spine. If Yuta reached out, he could tip Jaehyun’s chin back with his knuckle and watch the strands of hair fall out of his eyes. The significance did not escape Yuta—it just stunned him. So he avoided it. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He passed to the foot of the mats and lowered himself down in Jaehyun’s periphery, then gestured at Jaehyun to get off his knees and begin their insufferable ritual that was nightly chipping away at Yuta’s sanity even as it kept him sane.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The air was cooling, damp rather than muggy, sunk low and clinging as Yuta eased himself onto his right side while the ache of mulling, enduring unease wound up his leg.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Ask me about my back,” Yuta said before there was a single second to consider puzzling into each other’s embraces, because he couldn’t bear the noise building in his head.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Tell me how fate failed to sever your spine, Yuta,” Jaehyun murmured, gazing at him across the way, and Yuta could almost not believe how cheeky he was being while maintaining such stringent impassivity. This was closer to who he first had been. Hard, clever, distant.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta took a breath in, Jaehyun’s oil scent muffled by the damp cold. Jaehyun pillowed his head on his tucked arm, watching as Yuta committed more fully to telling a story and bleeding out his upset through insufficient, irrelevant words. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>One of the strands of Jaehyun’s hair failed to slip past his eyebrow, suspended over the corner of his eye. The tree above them was nudged by a breeze, and a single leaf twirled down in an orchestrated pattern. The chill began to press through the weave of his clothing.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Maybe you know this better than I do,” Yuta finally began, and he intended his tone to be accepted at face-value rather than as underhanded as it could be interpreted. “There are Ienkran spears that have teeth like a saw at their flat heads. I got caught by one—how well can you see right now?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun made an indecisive sound, but Yuta took the risk anyway, turning onto his stomach and touching his left shoulder to the mat. He reached back to hitch up his shirt until he could hold it at his nape. His heart thudded, not consenting to this vulnerability even as he exacted it. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He twisted his left arm to find the edges of five close and individual scars at the right side of his upper spine, shallower than they once had been. His shoulder protested at the angle he was forcing it into, unreasonably tender.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“They caught me here as I was running, and it scraped down my back, and then they threw as the distance increased—it jumps . . . here.” He thumbed at the singular untouched swipe of flesh in the stream of five streaks. Then, shifting, he unlatched his back knife and flipped the sheath to the opposite side of his body, one side of the strap still digging under him. He pressed his hand against the meager meat of his lower back where the clawing of scars morphed into a broad, twisted entrance point. “They stuck me at the end there, and by the time I got help for it there was blood down my entire leg. I have a few injuries that got infected. This is one of them.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It could have killed him, but as with all things that could have killed him, he recovered and survived.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A cool touch brushed between his shoulder blades, just fingertips, just three, but Yuta flinched anyway and dropped the clutch he had on his shirt. The touch left.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta pressed his cheek into the mat, blinking into the dark before he gripped his shirt again, breath unsteady. “Go ahead,” he said even as it made his thoughts swim and flounder. “Kill me if you want,” he added because his tongue was loose with agitation. Jaehyun responded with the one kind of exhale through his nose that pushed just enough to be a laugh.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta still flinched when Jaehyun’s fingers touched down again, but this time Jaehyun didn’t withdraw, simply pausing to let Yuta process. It was a fuller touch when Jaehyun moved, starting with the flattened backs of his knuckles, then turning to his fingertips again as they found the notch of scarring at his hip. It wasn’t a scar that was sensitive or tender—some of Yuta’s injuries had healed badly, but this one was just nasty instead of painful. Nonetheless, Yuta’s skin prickled with a wash of goosebumps skimming up his spine, across his shoulders, breathing at his neck.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta inhaled through his nose slowly, begging his heart to steady. “I got away because they threw it. I was nineteen and they came at me with their hands empty and their spear in the mud after I got up from the ground. I had a knife.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Where were you?” Jaehyun ventured, drifting away from the scarring to trace across the imprint Yuta’s back sheath had pressed into the small of his back, and Yuta allowed it. Alarm was sizzling up and down his skin, but he allowed it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And kept talking.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I was at the eastern border, mostly, then dropped south halfway through, then back up again at the tail end of the war. I wasn’t employed as a thief until I was twenty-three. Until then it was just scavenging and supplies. I probably took a chicken. I don’t remember.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Why are you letting me touch you?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta nearly shuddered from the question. Jaehyun’s voice had dropped further, an emotion slipping through, and his hand had come to rest, light, over the right side of his waist—like he could tug Yuta in at any moment. The heat of his palm trickled through between Yuta’s bones.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was in part because he wasn’t sure how else to make himself sleep in Jaehyun’s arms again. If his hands weren’t occupied, they’d be shaking. His mind was still snagging on frantic knots that had tangled up again or had never been untangled.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Fears, phobias, traumas were resolved quickly this way.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“If you ever do actually kill me,” Yuta said instead, a truth leaking out that he hadn’t been aware was under his tongue, the intention curling ugly and deep in his throat, “I want it to be personal.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The words burned in his mouth. He let go of his shirt on purpose this time, rolling back onto his side and forcing Jaehyun’s hand to fall to the mat between them. Yuta couldn’t meet Jaehyun’s eyes. He focused on the front hem of Jaehyun’s shirt as he reached for the leather of his back knife again and re-secured the strap against his skin.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun didn’t say a word until Yuta had it fixed. “Tell me why I should kill you,” he said, and when Yuta finally forced himself to fumble and close the gaps between them, Jaehyun moved without resistance. They were once again just getting it over with, getting it done before he started shivering from the dropping temperature or persistent anxiety. They were back to their regular distance, and Yuta was only holding his suspender, though Jaehyun hadn’t yet crossed his wing over.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>For a moment, Yuta’s breath knocked short and juddering in the small space between them. He tasted blood in his mouth for no reason. He locked his own fingers to stop himself from withdrawing. It wouldn’t get better until he forced himself to endure it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Maybe I’ll fuck up your plans,” he proposed, tight for the vice in his throat but not for intended emotion. “Really ruin your life.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Not much to ruin,” Jaehyun said, the words soft.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta closed his eyes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He almost unlocked his fingers to curl into his plumage. Really make a mess of the both of them. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Instead, he tilted his face down against Jaehyun’s arm like he’d done that morning, sinking his cheek against the old cotton and inhaling the subtle smells of travel and clean, oil-soft skin beneath it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Grab the pin for me,” he whispered against the cloth, and Jaehyun made a soft noise, barely there, before adjusting the arm that was curled around his head and sliding the metal out of his braid in one gentle motion. Yuta let go of Jaehyun’s suspender just to take it from his fingers, heart a painful mess in his chest.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He slid it until the bulb pressed between his hip and belt as Jaehyun readjusted his arm. Yuta then clenched down on his lungs and changed his mind. He returned his hand to Jaehyun’s back and skipped the suspender, lacing through the feathers without letting himself breathe.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Nothing changed. Jaehyun still froze, back tensing as Yuta swept his fingertips against his skin when he passed the plumage, and then everything was still. Another breeze snuck through the leaves.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun relaxed, and his wing came up over to block out the leaves and limpid moonlight.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta exhaled and sucked himself into the darkness.</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>Pain woke him before it was even close to dawn. He was pried from sleep with an open-mouthed gasp against Jaehyun’s sleeve, and Jaehyun jerked from the choked whine that left Yuta before he could have the lucidity to stop it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Jaehyun,” Yuta winced, “it’s going to rain.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Now?” he whispered and moved so Yuta could collapse onto his back and struggle through the sore burning in his shoulder, tender, the sensitivity having built too high to keep him under. He pressed his fingers there and tried not to whimper in the groggy, horrid dredges and mottled tendrils of a truly terrible sleep. His back knife pushed into his spine, adjusted badly under hurried fingers last night, apparently.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t know,” said Yuta, reaching to pinch at his eyes so he could let his brain swear his body up and down in peace for a moment. “It doesn’t come with a clock.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He flinched when Jaehyun touched over his left hip, locating the pin before Yuta heard him get up, the undergrowth crunching in a light summer frost. The cold was washing away the warmth of his core, insulated cocoon gone, and a spasm worked through his leg, that old injury twinging for a moment.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Fuck,” Yuta continued, “maybe it’s a storm.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“We’re close,” Jaehyun said eventually, voice wrecked as usual, hoarse and weak, but it was closer than Yuta expected. His eyes shot open, head rapidly clouding from discomfort, and regarded the hand Jaehyun was offering him from his crouch. The details of Jaehyun’s face in the darkness were still so imprecise, but he’d strapped on leather forearm bracers over his sleeves Yuta hadn’t seen him wear before.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta reached to take the offer with his right, and Jaehyun clasped him—held him right up to the inner arm and eased him to a sit through a wince Yuta couldn’t curb until Jaehyun had to rest back to avoid coming face-to-face with him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When his hand fell, Yuta stared. One of Jaehyun’s dimples suggested itself—he could see that much—though it wasn’t remotely a smile.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The cursory rooting Yuta took to his feelings came up tired and worn, nothing glaring or raw. Sleep was the constant turnaround, and Yuta was run ragged enough not to give a fuck about those implications.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t want to be awake right now,” Yuta said, blandly as the frigid, heavy air krept through his body.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s laugh was with his parted lips, still soundless, still nothing but air, but from his mouth like a chuckle instead of his nose. “It’s going to rain,” he reminded him, awful, almost a cough for what his vocal chords managed to achieve.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta gave a longsuffering, pinched blink, then leveraged himself up to his knees to roll up the mats before his fingers froze.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Maybe we’ll beat out any caravans.” That would allow them to settle down at an inn before they had to be clogged up at the gates and drawing eyes. Jaehyun might have been used to it, but that didn’t make it any more desirable. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He was slow rolling his mat with his shoulder inflamed, but he got the job done, took his clothing off the tree, and wrapped himself in his oiled leather cloak before remembering to put the pin in his braid.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His hair hadn’t dried, almost crispy with the cold leaking through its damp, woven strands, but he didn’t have the emotional energy or the physical ability to do anything about it. They gave the horses a quick rub-down, mounted, and went on their way as sleep still dug into the roots of Yuta’s eyes.</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>It didn’t rain. It hailed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It pounded and rattled off leaves, skittering like rice but as big as fingernails. Jaehyun hunched under the cup of his wings, fending off the wet hail but likely far more cold than Yuta was for his lack of coverage. He’d preened before the weather had hit, and any melted water rolled off his feathers in little crystal specks as the dismal sun rose behind the clouds.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He would have to put his wings away the minute they hit the main road, and it was less than an hour away. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The weather grew heavy, but Jaehyun still did it. He dropped his wings when the horses intersected the smooth dirt road littered with melting ice. The pattern was at least hitting at a slant from behind rather than straight down on their faces, but the trees were cleared on either side of the road. Speed traded another vexation.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun fell back from in front to beside him, knuckles red and face already streaking with pink strokes of pelleted water. As before, he bore the misery with seeming, mystifying dignity even as his head was tilted ever so slightly forward and his eyelids lowered to stop anything from hitting the critical planes of his face.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Do you know how to look ugly?” Yuta said just under the pace of their horses and the hail, stupid and tired and with a headache that was only compounded by the pain he couldn’t sufficiently knead out of his shoulder.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>For how Jaehyun jerked and startled, it was almost like Yuta had screamed it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s nose was pink, and for the moment Yuta caught him between the question and his processing it, he looked bewildered. Yuta pursed his lips at him under his folded hood, Jaehyun blinked, and then the Avia said, baldly with a voice half-warmed, “No. Do you?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And that nearly unseated him. The horses were flinging up mud from the clip they were keeping, the hail was loud, and what skin he had exposed to the air was smarting with cold, but despite Jaehyun’s impaired voice, Yuta was pretty fucking sure he hadn’t misheard.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“What?”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun had to be kidding, but his ears were collecting color.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Samgan may not let me in without a—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“Jaehyun.”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“They’re not Avia friendly,” Jaehyun said, louder than he had been, voice cracking at the edges like damaged leather as he blatantly changed the subject.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Alarmed by Jaehyun’s volley of the back-handed compliment, but also not unconcerned with the problem Jaehyun raised, Yuta grudgingly let it slip from his fingers. He was willing to torture him for it later at the price of solving an actual problem.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Samgan wasn’t intimate to Yuta in the right ways—the haunting grounds of his twenties weren’t exactly a desirable frame of reference. He couldn’t recall Samgan hating Avia, but there’d been no reason for him to see racial tensions like that until later. He’d be taking Jaehyun’s word for this one.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta pulled back on his mare, raised numb and hurting fingers to shove the cut leather portion out of the slit he’d made in his cloak to fashion it into something cinched, and shrugged it off completely.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun jerked his horse to a stop with such a powerfully insulted, hail-blotted expression that Yuta laughed even as he held out the leather for him and got pelted all at once by the weather. It hurt, but that was to be expected. The hail was getting wetter, and the skies would start going from a roll to a boil soon—this was storm weather. “It’ll cover them. I’m sure you can make them look less like you have two longswords strapped to your back under a cloak.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Because that’s exactly what it would look like if Jaehyun kept them folded like they usually were.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The horses shifted uneasily as Yuta pulled to a complete stop as well and watched the hail hit and dive off the oiled side of his leather. A piece of hail pinged off the crystal in the pin, and Yuta barely managed not to cringe from the suddenness of it—not that everything else wasn’t taking a beating. His arms were already stinging from where his clothes didn’t suffice for the pummeling.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What are you gonna do? Fly over the wall?” Yuta said, and tossed the cloak. Jaehyun at least didn’t let it drop, but it looked like he had half an instinct to fling it back, brow crinkling in objection and chilled lips hardening into that stubborn line. “You think hail’s going to kill me, sweetheart?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s expression went from stubborn to something violently vivid, but too fast to catch before he flung the shutters closed and Yuta was witnessing a walled-up, taciturn Avia again. “They’re going to question us at the gate,” Jaehyun said. “If they catch on, a cloak’s only going to make me look like smuggled goods.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta laughed at the annoyed snip of the last few words. He pushed the water seeping down his skin off his forehead. “Alright, then you’ll charm the guards, then?” That would be a pleasure.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s hardened mouth went further, and Yuta got to see a dimple for it. He held out his hand for his cloak, conceding to Jaehyun’s animosity toward options. “You’re the one,” said Yuta, “who brought it up to avoid the fact that you called me a looker.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun’s whole face hardened, but he handed over the cloak, then dug his heels into his horse to get back into motion.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I thought we should come up with solutions,” Yuta explained, a second behind and fond of the intimacy of being privy to only a corner of Jaehyun’s expression. It felt very familiar.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Put your cloak back on,” Jaehyun snipped over his shoulder, and if Yuta had been considering it for a moment, that option now flew out the window.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Not interested,” Yuta claimed, petulant for the sake of it, and Jaehyun gave him such a physically cold shoulder from that response that it cut off the rest of any possible conversation with abrupt finality.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But if it hurt to be stationary under the hail, it genuinely threatened to draw welts from him at the speed they went. Yuta found a lot of forms of suffering worth it every so often as his cloak sat draped across his lap, and though he could see right through himself and very reasonably thought himself a moron, this was one of them.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Besides, the hail turned to hard rain after another mile, and that was very recently familiar, if painful to only a slightly lesser degree. It was more like a lashing than it had been before Monic, and by the time they reached the gates in a small swell of tradespeople and travelers, Yuta felt both waterlogged and bruised.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The city walls weren’t very tall—Samgan was a minor city in comparison to Isdril, and especially minor in comparison to what Yuta recalled of Geran—but they were substantial enough in their wood-and-stone makeup to deter both predators and bandits from making low-effort heists.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Not that two thieves wouldn’t be able to get in anyway, especially when Yuta fished around for his aged Isdrillan blacksmith credentials folded into a hidden pocket of his saddlebags.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The skies crashed with the mulling of thunder and the guards looked miserable with their wide-brimmed, covered hats and rain-darkened boots as they admitted a small caravan through. They looked even worse after catching sight of Jaehyun, but in a displeased, racist kind of way.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta intended to follow after Jaehyun for a number of reasons, but witnessing him was the strongest one.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He watched as Jaehyun flexed his cold-mottled hands and dismounted right in front of the guards, the narrow gate gaping open but decidedly uninviting with the way they stood at the corners. Jaehyun stroked his hair back in place, his wet sleeve stretching over his bicep and flashing the shadow of that armband Yuta hadn’t been able to parse until now. There was the outline of a small, flat blade on the inside of Jaehyun’s arm.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Credentials?” said one of the guards  as Jaehyun held his reins and straightened in the downpour. Their voice was ragged already for the way it strained over the white noise, their expression wary and sour, and then Jaehyun did something with his face that Yuta absolutely knew his face could do, but found appropriately alarming regardless.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He smiled, and it took his handsome, weather-beaten façade into something disconcertingly pleasant, bunching up ever so slightly under his eyes and revealing the longer contours of his face. His wings adjusted, and Yuta had watched him for days, now, and knew that one had to be purposeful. They stretched an inch out, then tidied back in.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Your court is paying the fee,” Jaehyun said over the white noise, friendly, plain, and Yuta’s gut took a turn for the worse when it became clear that Jaehyun could do something lovely with his fucked up morning voice if it suited him. It was the slightest bit raspy in a horrifying complement to the way Jaehyun shaped his words like absolute truths. “I’m here on a limited contract for fringe purposes. You won’t see me anywhere you don’t want me.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The guard immediately speaking to him shifted their body weight, and the other leaned forward and yelled over the rain, </span>
  <em>
    <span>“What is it? What are you doing?”</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun didn’t so much as flinch, just politely shaking his head. Rain streamed down the groove of his cheek where it hadn’t quite made way for a dimple but could. If it wanted to. “I won’t disclose that.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>“They should have given you something when you were contracted,”</span>
  </em>
  <span> the guard kept yelling.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s common practice,” Jaehyun said, his voice still just raised enough, “to not do that for Avian services. It’s a courtesy superstition, as I’m sure you know. I believe we don’t frequent your city. I’m sorry—you’ll just have to pass along the fee.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The apology was mollifying, leaving their expressions to melt from distrusting to merely uncomfortable. “Who’s he?” called the closer one less disposed to yelling, and jerked their head in Yuta’s direction. Their hat wobbled, and they steadied it after a dip of water drained like a small waterfall down the side.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun looked over his shoulder, then back, seemingly prepared to answer. Yuta let him, fascinated, after all.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Met him on the road. He’s not with me for business. Here—” He stepped aside and pulled at his mare, neatly, as if he were already in the clear. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There were two directions racism toward Avia could go: wariness and an encouraged, widespread prejudice or outright animosity, which would get a person killed. Not least because Avia were incredibly valuable but because the odds of them dying by human hands were slim. It was a tenuous balance of fearful respect and measured hatred in Syltris, and so, presumably for the sake of not stepping on an invisible trap, the guards let him do that. They let him suppose he was welcome for risk of the discomfort of denying him further.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun walked through the gate.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Beautiful.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yuta dropped from his horse and held out his vellum papers. They never gave him any trouble since he wasn’t notorious—good thieves simply weren’t, and he wasn’t a bumbling shithead. “Terrifying monsters,” said the one guard as they handed his credentials back. “The courts keep employing them like they didn’t feast on our dead.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Nausea surged up in Yuta at the unbidden image—conjured, untrue; he had never seen the literal representation of actual Avia feeding on bodies, and he had seen mounds of dead. Crows, ravens, vultures did, but never Avia. They weren’t interchangeable.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But he couldn’t figure out his tongue beyond, “Which inn won’t be too crowded?” and then he had to get out of the way for the next tiny surge of travelers frigid in the rain. Even by that point, he was still mired in the effect of the fabrication, nerves ringing like he’d been knuckled in the shoulder.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He passed through the gate. Jaehyun hadn’t waited for him, but he hadn’t gone quickly, either, and Yuta closed the gap in less time than it took him to banish the revulsion caught in his throat. He was shaken in the way only things like that could make him, and the rain was still coming down like a stratospheric sob.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Northeast corner,” Yuta said, but his voice was thick and less talented than Jaehyun’s artifice. It’d be a walk, but they couldn’t get more drenched than this. “There’s an inn.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Jaehyun cast him a glance, but Yuta didn’t meet it.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="u"><span class="big">Trivia:</span></span><br/>These ones are pretty unimportant and mostly fun, so =]</p>
<p><b>Hail!</b> Is a summer storm phenomenon (not exclusively, but often), and it occurs when upper turbulence prevents precipitation from falling. The ice crystals are repeatedly tossed back up into the clouds and gradually collect more precipitation, freezing over and over again until they're too heavy for the wind to keep them up, and they drop. Little death ice pellets. I know you guys probably know what hail is, but y'know. Trivia. Also I didn't know the exact mechanics before I looked it up so I'd figured it was worth describing.</p>
<p><b>Vellum!</b> Is animal membrane used as paper and can be interchangeable with the term "parchment." It is also waterproof, which is why Yuta doesn't care about pulling it out in the rain. Some Gandharan Buddhist texts were written on vellum, so we know it was used in West Asia, but it's been a little tricky to parse when/if it was used elsewhere in Asia (at least with the scrounging I attempted, which wasn't necessarily the most high-quality scrounging) so I welcome any sources that can inform me. In the meantime, you can assume vellum is merely another Wistian convenience rather than something drawing from historical East Asia.</p>
<p>Please let me know if you've been enjoying!!! Or how, in what ways, etc. Yell at me about these men! They're driving me nuts!</p>
<p>
  <a href="https://twitter.com/speckledsolana">twitter</a>
  <br/>
  <a href="https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1">curiouscat</a>
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        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Keep the Threat Against My Skin</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>CW: The beginning of this chapter has strong exploitative power dynamics. If those make you uncomfortable, please take this as a heads up.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p></p><div class="center">
  <p>Her voice sounded like snot, like a flower rotted through by mildew and going limp and slimy. She was sick, because autumn made her ill, but she never departed from that sound even when she was well. It mixed with the winds gnawing at the outer walls, shuttered out by the sliding dividers and curtains.</p>
  <p>“Yoonoh,” wet, prolonged, vowels thick and crawling down his back as steam rose under his hands, the water slow and hot, the leaves settling. “You’re looking weak again,” she said.</p>
  <p>He felt the words sink through his wings, and he locked down on the urge to draw them closer to his body. Her bracelets slid and tinkled against the fabrics of her bed. Seeing her reach for him was embedded in his mind no matter how long he spent not looking at her.</p>
  <p>“The gardens are open to you,” she reminded him, voice eking out at an angle as her lungs shifted in her effort. Like he would ever turn before he had to. “You’ve been so good lately. We’ll let you train, Yoonoh.”</p>
  <p>His hands almost shook as he lowered the teapot, and they would have if heat hadn’t sunk through the stone glazing and made a small portion of his body less numb. He closed his eyes, waiting, counting the seconds until it became absolutely necessary that he face her.</p>
  <p>“Treasure is nothing when covered in rust,” she mused, her voice heavy, jewelry shifting. He scooped up her cup, steady, and turned for her, eyes open, breath cycling evenly through his nose, in, out. Her nails trickled down his forearms when he reached her, her wasted thumbs pressing into his wrists. Her chin bumped his fingertips. He tipped his palms for her.</p>
  <p>Every swallow she took made him want to wrench his hands away, ears sensitive to the way her throat bobbed and constricted, widened and flushed, pushed and rose. The veins in his wrists throbbed within her clutch. He breathed silently as she drew air between every swallow, unable through her clogged nose. </p>
  <p>She left dredges and released him, but not for longer than a moment. He dipped from her, but she caught him by his closest wrist again, her mouth wet. Oxygen convulsed in his lungs. He held her cup in one hand, its glazed edge wobbling for one moment before he reeled himself in, feeling the shape of her words before her mouth formed them.</p>
  <p>“You’ve put them away,” she bemoaned and began to rub her cold fingers up the muscles and tendons of his forearm. One hand made for his elbow and dug its nails into the underside of his bicep. Dry skin on skin rubbed in his ears. “You never have them out anymore. They’re so beautiful, Yoonoh, let me see them.”</p>
  <p>Panic rose, but not the anxious kind. The kind that made his vision slope away from her. The kind that made his thoughts go dark and cramped, stricken. Sensation left his hand as she pressed pointed crescents into him, turned up her eyes into his face as he stared at the ground, opened her mouth to express her wants one more time.</p>
  <p>He cowered. He bent his head and tried not to curl his fingers and barely kept his lips from parting to beg. To let slip, “Please don’t make me.”</p>
  <p>“Do it. Feel me,” she bid, and his veins in the forearm she held retched as warmth bloomed up toward his skin as per her demands. He averted his eyes, tilting his head away from her, and could feel the patterns rise upward into his skin from his elbow to his wrist.</p>
  <p>She arrived with it, clamping down on his mind, and the bile surging up his throat was almost too much to bear.</p>
</div><hr/><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p><p>There was a room, but both bathhouses were closed and the inn insisted there were no similar services within their walls to spare, which was perhaps a simple denial of the “filth” that threatened the inn’s doorstep.</p><p>Jaehyun hadn’t reacted to it, as always, and Yuta was too desperate for shelter to say something caustic. The horses had already been stabled. His fingers hurt. Everything did.</p><p>The wood of the inn’s stairwell groaned as they climbed it, and the familiar dread of resigning himself to a window was warped ever so slightly by the impending self-subjection of intimacy.</p><p>Then again, he could do so little when they reached the room for which they paid except to peel himself out of his shirt, then every other piece of sodden cloth while staunchly pretending it wasn’t an issue, change into dry clothes, and get that much closer to collapsing on the pathetic mattress provided by the inn.</p><p>And promptly, as always, feel like he was going to die the very second he was idle for longer than five minutes.</p><p>But he did the first steps, wrestling out of sodden clothes while Jaehyun unlaced the bracers around his forearms. Yuta was shuddering with the cold, one potential clack of his teeth away from biting his tongue, but at least Jaehyun, too, was trembling. His fingers were clumsy navigating the laces as he dripped onto the floor, and he lent Yuta privacy by simply keeping his eyes riveted on his task.</p><p>Alone with him, Yuta could slough off bullshit along with his clothes, tracing the softer, shivering lines of Jaehyun’s face beyond the cut of his muscles. He grounded himself across the six feet of distance they had between them, watching the purse of Jaehyun’s chill-darkened lips, the slide of water down his neck, and the pale weather pasting a sheen against his skin as it glared through the deep-eave window.</p><p>Jaehyun looked up once, likely to register the staring, and went as rigid under scrutiny as he could when quivering.</p><p>“Take stock again, I guess,” Yuta told him, looking away to kick out of his trousers. A cold wind tried to make an organ out of the window, giving a hollow, bone-freezing sweep into the room and rattling the door. “Figure out which scars you want to ask about. There’s no shortage.” His words were clenched for the convulsion the wind forced him into, and he tripped, slamming his right palm into the wall to prevent himself from falling on his ass. “Fuck.”</p><p>He was one layer away from naked, but he’d been there, done that in front of Jaehyun. It was only different by virtue of the earlier retort he remembered last second. It was scaffolded by the blush in Jaehyun’s ears when Yuta looked up again.</p><p>“You think I’m attractive,” Yuta said slowly and with absolutely no grace. He was shaking out of his fucking bones. There was no way to be graceful even if he could manage it on a normal day.</p><p>Jaehyun’s lips parted, gaze flicking away from Yuta’s shoulder sheath to his face. His ears couldn’t get darker than the current temperature already made them, but there was a blotchy sort of flush that mottled Jaehyun’s neck and jaw on its way to his face—never so visible as it suddenly was in the cold.</p><p><em> “Jaehyun,” </em>Yuta said, just barely managing to make his voice sound melodic with mirth. “I think you’ve forgotten what other men look like.”</p><p>Jaehyun yanked at the lace of his right bracer, and it came undone. He shook out his sleeve, drier than the rest of him, and did not grace Yuta with his gaze any longer.</p><p>“Or women,” Yuta said, dropping a few of his pretenses just so he could focus some of his energy on dragging his dry clothes out of his saddlebags. “People,” he humbled quietly, and cast Jaehyun another glance. The Avia was being a bit more jerky with his left bracer than he had been at the beginning with his right.</p><p>Yuta’s skin stuck against itself as he rose from his crouch to arrange new underwear. The dizziness got to him as he wove the cloth around, but he managed not to trip this time. He inhaled, dropped back down again, and wrung out his hair to the side so he could shake on a shirt without giving it a bath, too. His shoulder twinged with arguments. “Either way, you—”</p><p>His words died in his throat.</p><p>
  <em> Ash. </em>
</p><p>Jaehyun shook out his other sleeve.</p><p>
  <em> Mountains. </em>
</p><p>Yuta inhaled again. Then closed his eyes, hands stilling.</p><p>Distinct, almost forgotten.</p><p>His stomach dropped.</p><p>It had been a few days since he had smelled that profile up against Jaehyun’s skin, in the air, under oil, pressed into the unwashed sleeve of his shirt. He’d barely identified it—barely placed its taste—and then hadn’t traced it since.</p><p>Yuta’s head swam.</p><p>He looked over at Jaehyun just as he leaned to place the bracers back in his saddlebags. His posture wasn’t immaculate, his face wasn’t swept empty. He looked real, familiar as he reached over his shoulder to unlatch his shirt from between his wings. </p><p>He paused before letting the clasp go, however, once again confronting Yuta’s attention.</p><p>Frequently slow to react, the little jump to Jaehyun’s eyebrows came as a surprise. Yuta snorted before he could even remember why he was looking at all, warmed and amused before he could remember he was freezing and guarded and cold. </p><p>The back of Jaehyun’s shirt slumped down his feathers, wrinkling the wet sides that were visible to Yuta as the fabric piled there.</p><p>With a forced exhale, Yuta turned back to his own saddlebags and drew his own shirt out of the folds, shrugging it over his head before his tongue found its brain again. He was mulling over his fading paranoia, though—not for lack of suspicion, but for the presence of subtle and worrying confirmation.</p><p>Magic residue was present with seemingly random creation given the fact that Jaehyun hadn’t taken flight, targeted a person within Yuta’s sight, or done anything of the sort that would constitute the usage of his thighs. Blunt power. That was all a source in the legs did, unless the Isdril witchsmith had hedged certain truths.</p><p>Exhausted as his mind ran a logical gamut, Yuta skimmed his eyes to Jaehyun’s mid-calf, watching every splash of water on the floorboards, his waterlogged clothes hooked up before they could hit the ground, his bare ankles and bare feet. There were scars on his legs that Yuta hadn’t noticed in Prinks, blushing from the cold at scrapes against his ankles and irregular, thin bands around his leg joints. They were faded, but there, like the strokes of a wraith.</p><p>He watched the way Jaehyun’s muscles twitched from the cold and flexed, his balance teetering in the fine movement there, shifting as he laid his clothes out across his things, marginally better there than on the ground.</p><p>The chill came back to nip Yuta, and he shuddered, standing to wrestle on his trousers and shove his shirt into the waistband to protect what feeble heat he was producing. He stuck his fingers into his underarms where the heat gave him pain, ignored the protest of his shoulder, and looked over one last time as Jaehyun pulled on his pants as well.</p><p>The purpose was to look for traces. </p><p>The witchsmith in Isdril had sourced with her chest, she’d told him, and whenever she’d lifted anything from a distance, her magic patterns would crawl all the way up to the base of her neck and glow like a fever that swallowed a flame. It would leave stains for a time like someone had scraped a dull stylus across her skin and over the lacework of her veins.</p><p>Jaehyun had nothing of the sort. What he did have was shaking hands as he adjusted the straps of his suspenders against the bare skin of his torso.</p><p>Yuta hadn’t ever seen his smith partner shirtless, and he hadn’t yet seen Jaehyun bare from the front. His eyes drew away from the scar marring the flesh of Jaehyun’s hip and came instead to trace the lean muscles that changed his otherwise human anatomy. </p><p>There was a crease under Jaehyun’s pectorals and his dark, flush nipples where slim cords of muscle were then defined and developed, tugging up against his firm abdomen as he moved. His sternum was more prominent, changing the valley between his pectorals, and his entire torso moved differently than Yuta knew muscle under skin moved. Mostly slim, broad in the shoulders, and odd to look at, but genuinely, strangely pretty. </p><p>Not an inch of patterning was visible anywhere, and the scars Yuta had seen on his legs weren’t the vein traces of magic. The trek to the inn had taken time, though, and Yuta didn’t have a finger on how long the traces took to leave.</p><p>Jaehyun’s hands dropped from their task, and this time he stared back at Yuta dead-on, unwavering, and continued without any variance until Yuta was forced to say through a building ache in the back of his head and neck, “I’m sorry, I figured we had an unspoken give-and-take.”</p><p>Jaehyun’s expression went from smooth to pinched, like he found Yuta genuinely exasperating. “Have you had your fill?”</p><p>Yuta grinned at him, and regret immediately blotched Jaehyun’s already weather-pinked features. “You’re really putting your foot in your mouth today. Goodness,” Yuta teased. “I could never get my fill of you.”</p><p>The stern exhale through Jaehyun’s nose was less laughter and more judgment, but Yuta was struggling to simply make sense of his thoughts. Getting blindsided by Jaehyun twice in so little time demanded more from his psyche than he could offer up.</p><p>Questions muddled thick on his tongue, and he superseded their clumsiness by draping his clothes haphazardly across his saddlebags, gathering his blanket, and lowering himself onto the thin mattress on the floor as Jaehyun fixed his fresh shirt.</p><p>Yuta drew his hands over his face, rubbing over the stubble he needed to shave, the headache, the strain his wet hair had distributed, the pinched distress of his shoulder. His mouth was hard and cold under his shivering fingertips, and he couldn’t come up with a better question through the noise. </p><p>“Jaehyun, how many sources do you have?”</p><p>He didn’t lower his hands to watch Jaehyun freeze in this arctic tundra of a cheap and wind-ravaged room. The sloped streets far down below would start flooding, soon, riddling through the raised stone bases of the buildings. Even lying down, his muscles were still shaking. </p><p>Jaehyun wouldn’t kill him while he had the heels of his palms digging into his eye sockets. If he hadn’t failed to notice Yuta had rendered himself harmless, there wouldn’t be a point.</p><p>But, not unexpectedly, Jaehyun didn’t answer for so long that Yuta ended up dropping his hands anyway and tilting his gaze Avia-ward. “Your thighs, your . . . ” Yuta scanned over Jaehyun’s clenched body, wings cramped against him but feathers far from sleek for the cold. His vision was blurry for the exhaustion doubling down, which meant it would only get worse. “ . . . arms? Forearms? That’s what the bracers are for, right?”</p><p>Jaehyun stared at him, but Yuta was familiar with that—and the looking away, too, if Jaehyun chose that option instead. Jaehyun inhaled, but then he stopped midway through it, and it almost exhaled back out like a cough. Maybe it was a laugh. Maybe he choked. Either way he said with his voice reaching under, deep and quiet, “I can’t do anything around you.”</p><p>Jaehyun had never said the like around him before. It wasn’t exactly warm, but it felt uniquely intimate—like Yuta had earned seeing the poison in his glass.</p><p>“That’s not an answer,” Yuta murmured nonetheless. He’d left his back knife on, but he could foresee its unprovoking outline becoming a problem. If he were up for moving, he would do something about it. “I’ll trade, if I have to,” he continued, tracing the edges of Jaehyun’s unlatched shirt. It draped on him, weighed into position by the clasps in the back but loose at his sides. “Do you want help with that?”</p><p>In Jaehyun’s face was the taciturn line, the subtle tremble of cold, and a certain wariness solidifying at the offer, exhaustion-blurred. With a mental effort, Yuta pried himself up to a sit, joints already stiffened, the pain of the action not something he managed to shield from his face. </p><p>“You’re far more likely to stab me now than you ever have been,” Jaehyun said once he was up, still unmoving to the extent that his shivering muscles were able.</p><p>“Well, that’s just not true,” Yuta coaxed. “I felt considerably more violent toward you last night and we both survived it.”</p><p>The corner of Jaehyun’s mouth tucked. He did not let Yuta latch his shirt, reaching behind himself and keeping Yuta firmly in his sight. Yuta listened to the clumsy, tiny clinking of metal and rubbed his palms on the rough wool of the blanket draped across his lap.</p><p>“It’s two,” Jaehyun said finally as he folded his arms after the small task was done. A wind coughed through the window again and Jaehyun’s feathers ran against it. They both balked, but there was nothing to cover the window with that wouldn’t be buffeted off immediately.</p><p>“You’re sure it’s not all four?” Yuta said after he could unclench his teeth. A spark of pain in his jaw followed. A week’s worth of tension was killing him in unprecedented ways.</p><p>Jaehyun’s look was dry enough for Yuta to more or less take his word for it: “It’s just two.”</p><p>“Do all Avia have two?”</p><p>“I don’t know.”</p><p>“Was it fun looking inside my head?”</p><p>Yuta hadn’t realized Jaehyun’s posture easing, but he went taut at the sharp question, his wings cutting tighter inward. All he could hear was rain. Rain lashing against the roof above them, plummeting to the streets below, a roll of noise in the clouds above.</p><p>“No?” Yuta hummed. Because if Jaehyun’s second source really was his arms, he would have been privy to Yuta’s emotions—or, worse yet, been able to manipulate them. Yuta wouldn’t know for sure which it was until he yanked the answer out of Jaehyun like a premature root from the ground. “Tell me how it works, darling, and maybe we’ll get some sleep tonight.”</p><p>Jaehyun’s smallest nail dug into the crease of his elbow, and the blottish flush stained his jaw like the bleeding ink of a confession letter. “I haven’t done it to you in days,” Jaehyun said, words a little colder now. Detached, if Yuta had to wager a guess.</p><p>His head pounded.</p><p>“That’s nice. I really appreciate it,” Yuta said, and tried to be warm to contrast him even if he’d rather bleed out on the mattress below him. “Done what?”</p><p>Yuta felt his mind flinch when Jaehyun moved—his body was too slow to jolt into that, but it was probably for the better. Jaehyun didn’t make for him. He just raked through his hair with one hand, tugged on his roots, then let go. Oiled strands fell into his eyes and across his temples more thoroughly than they had the previous night, making him look somewhat younger, if bedraggled.</p><p>“Read—<em>tried </em> to read your emotions,” Jaehyun said, a little less stiff but looking at Yuta ever darker in the pathetic storm light, mouth joyless. “If I feel very strongly, I can make you feel my emotions instead.”</p><p>The information sat for a time, Jaehyun unmoving, Yuta tamping down a familiar sense of mindless, uncontrollable anxiety. His digits were numb even curled up and tucked as they were. Moving them, rubbing his fingers against his blanket, was like trying to start a fire with icicles. </p><p>He took in a silent breath through his mouth, swallowed around it, dug the heel of his palm into the muscles of his thigh where there was a never-ending ache he refused to let recover. “Did it help?”</p><p>He could see Jaehyun hesitate. The breath in his chest paused, his eyes flicked down somewhere and up, and Yuta couldn’t read emotions like a book, but he rather thought Jaehyun was tamping something of his own kind down. “I stopped doing it,” Jaehyun said, which was more of an answer than Yuta had asked for.</p><p>“Don’t do it again,” Yuta said.</p><p>“I won’t.”</p><p>“Jaehyun, I really—”</p><p>“I won’t, Yuta. I don’t want to.”</p><p>The sky roared at the ground and finally discharged some light just as Yuta’s grip slipped. He gasped in a breath, lungs pulling down on his heart and grinding into his ribs. “Fuck,” Yuta said for the second time, but it was on the cusp of what could have been a ragged lurch, a sort of confused, angry panic. His gaze was stuck in the middle between them, where Jaehyun stood and Yuta was trying to keep his ribs closed. Jaehyun had seen enough already. “It was that awful, huh?”</p><p>“I wasn’t sure I would care.”</p><p>When Yuta blinked, the room sharpened. He refocused on Jaehyun’s face and the way it had drawn pale. More lightning flashed, but Yuta didn’t hear the thunder.</p><p>He was seeing Jaehyun in real time, overlaying the pain in Yuta’s head. He looked cornered and fraught, and he dropped his eyes to the side when Yuta tried to meet them.</p><p><em> “You probably shouldn’t” </em> seemed like a hypocritical thing to say, but the sound it made in Yuta’s head as it reflected back on him clashed so loudly with the rest of the noise that he was left with his head ringing and no words.</p><p>He found his breath in the stunned, storm-crowded silence, but it was a lot of dread to shoulder.</p><p>Jaehyun’s tremors were so bad they reminded Yuta of a fluttering heart.</p><p>“Come here,” Yuta said at length.</p><p>Jaehyun didn’t move. It was hard for Yuta to know for sure since his eyes were losing acuity for the pain in his head again, but it looked like he wasn’t breathing, either.</p><p>“I won’t stab you,” Yuta promised. “Come here.”</p><p>Jaehyun drew even further away. Just one decisive step.</p><p>The laugh that fought out of Yuta was weak and brief and ended with him closing his eyes for the moment he untucked his shirt and reached for his shoulder sheath.</p><p>He unbuckled the entire thing, wincing for the grief his shoulder gave him, and set it all on his lap. He went for his back knife next, then his arm sheath, and that was it because he hadn’t replaced his sgian dubhs. Leaning forward, he deposited all three sheaths and their weapons at the foot of the bed and at a genuinely inconvenient distance, drew both palms over his eyes with tired anxiety, then held one hand out. “C’mon,” Yuta said. “I’m too tired to stick my fingers in your eye sockets, I promise, and we’re both too cold for this shit.”</p><p>Seconds passed, and there wasn’t a single touch to his fingers, but Yuta did hear the clack of Jaehyun’s saddlebag buckle. He opened his eyes and lowered his hand, waiting for Jaehyun to sit with him or huddle miserably in the corner while Yuta endured being completely bereft of his arsenal.</p><p>Before rising with his own blanket in his hands, Jaehyun lifted Yuta’s rondel from atop his clothes and strapped the leather around his hips. Not looking at Yuta, chin tucked down to look at the dagger, he unsheathed it just enough that Yuta could see the clean and dry color of its steel before sliding it back in.</p><p>Yuta released a breath that had caught halfway through his chest, fixated on the reddened tremble of Jaehyun’s hands, then the painful flush around his jaw as he crossed the last few steps to Yuta from his bag. He left his dirk behind.</p><p>More lightning flashed, clouds grumbling like the violent elderly, and Jaehyun pressed his knees to the mattress, body close enough to touch. He stared at Yuta again with his hands curled in the blanket across his thighs, breath rising a little too irregularly.</p><p>Yuta leaned back, easing down instead of dropping and winding himself from the impact like he almost wanted to do. “Any more secrets,” Yuta began, keeping his voice to a mumble just to see if it would get Jaehyun to relax, “that will make me feel like death and a quarter?”</p><p>“I don’t know,” Jaehyun said, looking sallow yet as intense as ever. His eyes had been so different while smiling—Yuta had barely seen it.</p><p>He could feel himself lapsing into that inadvisable space of complacency again, that false sense of safety in his bones like a headlock, but he supposed he’d never felt more alive than when Jaehyun was cutting him open with a feather.</p><p>He breathed out a short laugh. “Great. We’ll see which trap I willingly walk into next.” Gingerly, he pushed himself onto his right side and pulled at his blanket. “Get down here.”</p><p>Again, Jaehyun touched the rondel at his hip, and again Yuta stuttered in breath, in motion. “Don’t use this against me,” Jaehyun said.</p><p>Yuta honestly hadn’t considered it. “Who are you to tell me how to use my own weapon?” Yuta asked, and for a moment he could enjoy the steady scrutiny of Jaehyun’s gaze as his bones tried to condense and dissolve. “I won’t,” he said finally, “probably. It’s a charming image, though.”</p><p>Despite that, apparently Jaehyun judged that half-assed promise as enough. He set his hands on the bed and guided himself down with a slow, tight exhale. Yuta wasn’t alone in the stiffness, evidently, and that was even more evidenced by the time Jaehyun reached out for him with hands and skin as cold as his own. He reached tentatively, visibly unsure if Yuta had intended this outcome when he had called him down.</p><p>It took Yuta a moment, steadying himself before raising his hand and pulling the pin out of his hair. It wasn’t even close to night yet, but the likelihood of falling asleep in a repeated pattern as they tried to get warm was high. As disrupted as Yuta felt sometimes, he was still lulled by habit.</p><p>The metal burned cold against the skin of his thigh. He lifted his head for Jaehyun’s arm and almost apologized for the frigidness of his fingers by the time he buried them into the small of Jaehyun’s back.</p><p>The down was preciously warm, and Jaehyun jolted in protest, sucking in a breath, then making the smallest sound of alarm when Yuta, letting himself get possessed and calling it logic, buried his nose in the bent crease of Jaehyun’s shoulder. He moved agonizingly close, arm slipping further over Jaehyun’s back and his other adjusting to slide further past his waist, the oil scent familiar, strong, and mixed with cold rain.</p><p>Full seconds passed while Jaehyun figured out what to do with his arm given the way it was frozen around Yuta’s head. He could almost hear Jaehyun’s heart as he breathed one layer away from his skin, one twist of his spine away from fitting his leg perfectly between Jaehyun’s.</p><p>He felt Jaehyun’s fingertips tap against his hair once, gentle, and then touch down again, settling. His breath rose and fell in a large swell and ebb, and then Jaehyun’s body gave out all at once like the end of his rope had slipped from his fingers. </p><p>He was lax, almost soft even as shivers still cascaded through him, and he tipped his wing up and over, flooding out the feeble light.</p><p>A wave of rain splashed against the eave of their window, thunder cluttered against itself,  and Yuta’s breath was already creating a pocket of warmth. </p><p>“Do I need to trade you a scar?” Yuta mumbled, almost up against the cloth of Jaehyun’s shirt and his brain already closing down. There was relief in closing his eyes for good around his headache and fatigue.</p><p>“No,” Jaehyun said, voice low and dense and warm like Yuta had truly stabbed him and he was dying. “I took from you already.”</p><p>Yuta lifted his thumb and nudged it up against Jaehyun’s feathers, close to the base of his wing for where his arm was positioned. He got the tiniest reaction from it—a little twitch of his muscles, a small rise from his feathers. “Am I going to get an apology?” he asked with his last inch of lucid bargaining.</p><p>“No,” Jaehyun sighed. “I don’t think so.”</p><p>Yuta thought he wouldn’t like one anyway.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="big"><span class="u">Trivia:</span></span><br/><b>Topjang!</b> This is actually left over from last chapter. I forgot to say that the flat-headed saw spears that Ienkrans <em>can</em> use is based on the Korean topjang. I believe the hangul is 톱창, but I had to do some backwards research to figure that out, so if I’m wrong, poke me! The literal translation is “saw spear.” Also, just to make it very clear once again jic: the Ienkrans are not Korean. Syltris is not Japan. There are no such parallels.</p><p><b>Underwear!</b> That “weaving” Yuta’s doing when he’s “arranging” new underwear? He’s wearing fundoshi (ふんどし), a traditional Japanese undergarment that goes back as far as—if not farther than—the 8th century. WWII swept these out of majority use as underwear because of influences from the West (elastic-band underwear was ushered in then). Cotton or linen were typical. Yuta’s using linen (flax and hemp were interchangeable in Japan).</p><p><b>Flooding!</b> This isn’t really touched on, but southeastern Syltris is very obviously at the mercy of severe precipitation during their wet season. There are <em>many</em> ways to combat this, and not every settlement they pass through is going to have the monetary advancement to properly accommodate. Samgan raises their buildings and uses “attenuation.” Instead of employing flood walls, Samgan instead uses natural structures and spaces placed to reduce the velocity and turbidity of water. Essentially, they strategically build their streets to slope in certain ways, and then any runoff not channeled out of the city is absorbed by natural buffers in the form of gardens, strips of earth, etc. It’s more complex than this and is hard to describe without getting too technical, but hopefully this lends a little color.</p><p><b>Tea Ceremonies!</b> These are deeply significant and especially important across many different Asian cultures, so I purposefully departed from them with what Jaehyun’s . . . I’ve been calling them “preludes” . . . depicted. Similarities lie in the order—boiling, cooling in bowls, teapot, cups—and loosely what they’re made of, though the materials used for tea sets are traditionally significant as well.</p><p><b>Windows!</b> I’ve made some blunders with windows so far in the fic (I’m calling them blunders instead of outright mistakes because I can’t exactly do wrong by my own fictional universe, but I’ve been trying to be conscientious of the influences I include and not be blind to my own defaults), but glass windows were expensive and prized. Alternatives were shutters, oiled paper, membranes, or!!! Deep eaves. Oiled paper windows were common in Europe before glass windows became accessible. Deep-eave windows were far more common in Japan, and Samgan in Wist made theirs particularly deep. Hence the inconvenience I gracefully thrust upon these two unfortunate men.</p><p><b> General Note!</b> As everything is, every facet and detail I include that is inspired by certain cultures is also naturally couched in history and significance—from the bangkungs to the fundoshi. If I ever insult by drawing inspiration from something for this story, please do not hesitate to correct me.</p><p>
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<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Stay Your Alchemic Hands</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>It is <em>very</em> late, and this chapter is also late, and I do not have my trivia notes prepared. I will add them tomorrow ♡ In the meantime, I apologize for all the jargon Yuta slings around. They're all components used to achieve the same thing, just in various steps.</p><p>Please don't expect a new chapter until the 22nd. I need a small break to hit a deadline, but then I'll be back to Wist =] I apologize for the delay with this one. Life briefly threw me off my game.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
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  <p>Five occasions before, finally, at the age of sixteen, he understood what he was looking at.</p>
  <p>The naïveté could have been attributed to lack of proximity. It wasn’t until he was old enough to be brought out at court and commanded to be graceful while the nobility split words into slivers. By then, he knew what it felt like to have his wings bound tightly with green twine to balance out the offense of his plumage. By then, he hadn’t been clipped in some time. He was strong enough again—though not by much—for it to hurt.</p>
  <p>He’d seen Avia like them, but he hadn’t recognized them for what they were. If he clawed through his fragmented memories, he could remember the first: feathers like toasted rice, fluffed and layered without sleekness. The second: spangled in blue and white, delicate and narrow on a slight and fair body. The third, fourth he couldn’t remember well. Gray, maybe. A dull yellow, maybe.</p>
  <p>An interesting brown, this time, as they served tea at the low tables, as they worked to not be seen while still being used like a token of status. Their wings hung. Capelike, veil-like. Sagging against the clean-swept floors. Unbound. Limp.</p>
  <p>He spilled a drop of water onto the wood, hot. The sound of earthen feathers dragging made his vision go sideways. </p>
  <p>The nobility seated in front of his hands startled through their upper lip and flayed him with their eyes.</p>
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    <em> Deep, shingled wings the color of stained paper, fresh mud, shaved wood—tilted proud. She was a messenger with barbs around her bare belly but skin the color of sunshine. She looked at him like she wished he were dead. She gave bladed blows like she wished she could be the hand that did it.  </em>
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  <p>Avia did not speak to each other, though sometimes they did. He did not hope he could speak to these ones, this one, them. Them, with wings like dead things.</p>
  <p>
    <em> “There are worse things than being watched when you fly, Yoonoh.” </em>
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</div><hr/><p> </p><p>It happened with a twitch, and Yuta wondered how he ever happened to stay asleep at all—a mild flex, a heavy exhale, a harder press of the fingers against his hair, and then a shudder from the lungs. Nightmares weren’t hard to spot, even in complete darkness.</p><p>He was pulled from sleep like that, clamped between Jaehyun’s arms and legs, feet cold but core warm, and the little, fluttering breaths from Jaehyun’s lips and tiny jerks of his muscles that reminded Yuta of a mutt dreaming.</p><p>He could move—yank Jaehyun from sleep by the end of the chain that was Yuta’s entire body, a trip wire for a pratfall—or he could stay still—ride it out until the nightmare took its course and the both of them faded back into sleep—or he could cave at the whine of air that escaped Jaehyun’s throat and gently, gently stroke the warm feathers against his hand with a groggy mind pulled from gray clouds.</p><p>Outside the window, the storm had abetted into a patter he didn’t hear until he had his fingers already scrunching in, smoothing out, awkward and stiff with pain leaking down from his shoulder with every finite movement.</p><p>More lucid by the second, he felt like an idiot consoling a grown and unconscious adult, especially with how sensitive Jaehyun was to touch, but he’d been there. What karma had allowed him to survive bit him in the ass at night. Every night. Death came upon him in other ways, and had he ever had someone to comfort him, maybe this would have been something he’d want.</p><p>Or maybe Jaehyun would kill him. The dice were thrown.</p><p>It was working to a certain extent. Jaehyun’s breaths were going from stuttered to longer, if shaky, and then Yuta opted to carefully attempt to adjust his arm so that he wasn’t pulling so badly on his injury. He shifted against Jaehyun’s skin, and Jaehyun woke with a violence.</p><p>His arms clenched so hard Yuta lost his breath, his wing stretching out and up and revealing the haziest of outlines, and Jaehyun’s fingers dug into Yuta’s hair so hard he felt the pull ricochet down his neck, holding him by the roots as Jaehyun’s waking breath crashed.</p><p>“Jaehyun,” Yuta said. It was wary, careful, and muffled against Jaehyun’s chest on top of it all—of all the cursed positions. “I’m not doing anything. You were dreaming.”</p><p>Jaehyun’s breath came in shallow, fitful handfuls. There were three hairs that were pinching Yuta’s scalp, painful but ebbing into a numbness the longer Jaehyun stayed paralyzed.</p><p>Yuta took in a steadying breath and moved his own fingers, doing the soft, awkward stroking motion again. Jaehyun flinched with his entire body, back arching inward, and then he let go of Yuta all at once, yanking away so quickly that the shove to Yuta’s shoulder almost forced tears into his eyes, face pinching from the pain of it. He clenched his teeth around a gasp, breath shaky in his nose until he stopped seeing spots and became aware of the last touch Jaehyun had left against him. </p><p>The arm under Yuta’s head retracted to just Jaehyun’s wrist against his neck like a threat. Fragile flesh against fragile flesh.</p><p>The strands of his braid were pulled out of order. He could barely see Jaehyun in the mulishly dark, frigid room. He wouldn’t be able to move fast enough to get away from Jaehyun’s hand and the fingers that rested under the body of his braid. There wasn’t a single weapon he could draw except for his own, which he could not see in the shadow of Jaehyun’s frozen wing.</p><p>Now painfully awake, he could identify the sensation of feeling torn, which was such a terrible development that it took him a moment to find words.</p><p>“Jaehyun,” he repeated as low and soft as he could into the bleak white noise of rain, mouth free from his shirt. “Jaehyun, it’s just me. I wasn’t going for my dagger. You’re okay.”</p><p>He heard another crashing exhale and then a gasp—one that Jaehyun audibly held and squeezed. Jaehyun’s fingers twitched. Yuta’s throat tightened.</p><p>“You’re okay,” Yuta said, feeling worse by the second. Heat leached out of him and he tried not to shiver while Jaehyun’s hand was still there. He continued slowly. “You’re in Samgan. It’s so fucking cold and they don’t have shutters on their windows. It’s dark because we slept early. This is Yuta. It’s raining.”</p><p>He could feel his own heartbeat against the warmth of Jaehyun’s wrist, stumbling unpleasantly fast. Perhaps Jaehyun could hear it over his own panic.</p><p>Jaehyun’s wing started to fold, though, a swatch of pitch against black, and once it was down, revealing a feeble square of light, Jaehyun withdrew his touch. Yuta tried not to flinch at the brush of Jaehyun’s palm. The gap between them yawned, a frigid buffer.</p><p>Again, Jaehyun’s breath crashed, but it was muffled this time, crowded by the just-pale-enough suggestion of his hands.</p><p>Seconds passed, and Yuta finally let himself shudder and carefully reach for his blanket, too wary of making sudden noises or movements. He dragged the wool higher up again but not so far that he’d expose his feet.</p><p>“Did I hurt you?” Jaehyun rasped out, ugly and mottled.</p><p>“No,” Yuta said, because his scalp could survive the minor offense and his shoulder was at the fault of the weather. “No, of course not.”</p><p>The next sounds were big, Jaehyun’s body and wings moving like something poorly drunk. He lifted himself from the bed with quaking breaths, wings sagging and shuddering, and stumbled to his feet. Yuta heard Jaehyun’s feet on the floor, the slap of his bare hand on the wall, another borderline emotional breath.</p><p>“I need to walk,” Jaehyun said. “I need to—I can’t go back to sleep.”</p><p>And Samgan undeniably had a curfew in order, but Yuta had never in his life cared about anything of the sort. </p><p>For a moment, Yuta closed his eyes, trying to reconcile the shaking inside of his ribcage that had nothing to do with the cold. It burned.</p><p>He shoved it down.</p><p>And pushed himself into motion.</p><p>He picked himself up just enough to reach for the foot of the mattress and collect his knives. His shoulder sheath went over his shirt in the darkness, his body too unwilling to remove a layer, but suffered the cold against his forearm and back as he mourned the loss of precious heat. He then put the pin back into his ruined braid.</p><p>Jaehyun was pulling on his shoes with not a single modicum of deliberation, each movement seemingly careless and immediate in what vague outlines Yuta could identify. He wanted to see him more completely—wanted to know what face he was wearing, what was in his eyes, what minutia he could be learning and logging if only there were more light.</p><p>Yuta groped for his boots, fingers already aching in the cold, and resolved to pull out the cloak he’d been too dull to recall when he’d been shivering hours earlier. With a third, leather layer, he might end up sweating.</p><p>He didn’t know what steps Jaehyun was taking, but he imagined the Avia could survive a nighttime stroll of stiff breezes.</p><p>“Are we braving the window?” Yuta murmured in the drizzling quiet. He could hear Jaehyun tightening the laces of his bracers with fumbling jerks. He didn’t suspect any ulterior motives—their new understanding extended to Yuta reserving the right to stab Jaehyun if he attempted to read his emotions again.</p><p>Jaehyun didn’t answer.</p><p>“I can’t see you nodding if you did,” Yuta reminded him, making way for his saddlebags and dragging out his cloak. He didn’t relish the idea of leaving his things in the room with an open window glaring out into the city, but he also wasn’t keen on the idea of hauling his cargo around for a stroll in the rain.</p><p>“The stairs are loud,” Jaehyun said, little more than a gritty whisper, which was probably for the grace of his voice.</p><p>Yuta pondered the pain of descending a wall versus the risk of rolling his ankle. “Sure,” he said regardless. “Window it is.”</p><p>He pushed himself to his feet, tugging on his last layer and pulling up the hood, then forced himself to leave his things behind. Chance was in their favor—the likelihood of a thief pilfering from them in particular was slim, and if there was someone hiding in the bushes or an alleyway, waiting for people staying at the inn to break curfew, Yuta hoped Jaehyun would hear the snotty whistle in their nose.</p><p>The room went completely dark for a moment as Jaehyun pressed his body into the eave, wings cinched inward and impressively, just sufficiently narrow enough to allow him passage. Yuta carefully picked his way over just to witness the fall if he could, the outstretch, the cup of Jaehyun’s wings to make the landing gentle.</p><p>He could barely see it and couldn’t even hear the mild landing of Jaehyun’s boots hitting the watery passage below. It was one of Samgan’s strip-like gardens that muffled the effects of flooding, but there was a good amount of smooth, sloping pavement, mud, and soggy grass that the odds of Yuta slipping to his major detriment suddenly seemed egregiously high.</p><p>Rubbing over his face and leaning back inside the room, he again remembered his long overdue shave.</p><p>He paused.</p><p>He hadn’t recalled hearing Jaehyun strap on his dirk.</p><p>There were ulterior motives, of course, to remembering it at all, but he immediately could come up with the defense of security—he had no evidence to presume that Jaehyun would take as badly to his dagger being stolen as Yuta would, but his brain wasn’t creative enough to sympathize with the idea of someone <em> not </em> caring.</p><p>Without the time to weigh consequences, he crouched for Jaehyun’s things and dipped his hands under the flap, tamping the metal buckle with his free fingers. It took five seconds to find it and three to strap it on, albeit shoddily. Just shy of a short sword in length, there was something electric about its weight, a sort of dizziness to this particular inadvisable action. He’d keenly missed the reassuring presence of a dagger at his hip, but this was different.</p><p>He pushed himself to the edge of the window, feeling the rain freckle over the back of one hand, and acted like he hadn’t taken much longer to reach this point than he had even as nerves he hadn’t felt in ages still stirred in his belly at this theft in particular.</p><p>He also considered the drop and the way water leaked down the upper woodwork and worn limestone supports like glassy sheets of ice. His exhale pushed through his teeth, wary and bracing.</p><p>Rolling his shoulder gently into less of a hunch, he turned his back to the city and planted his hands against the outer edge of the sill. He didn’t let himself take a moment for steadying breaths, immediately swinging one leg out past the lip, then pushing off. He dropped his left hand against the wall at the last second to prevent himself from knocking into the inn’s siding and pulling at his injury, steadying himself as his spine gave a sleepy crackle and he felt the knuckles of his right hand go white. His skin pinched against the slick wood and the butterflies died.</p><p>He let go before his grip slipped and tried to absorb the impact of hitting the ground with the balls of his feet without getting knocked on his ass by the sod at the same time. Those two efforts weren’t complementary. Sliding too much to keep his balance, Yuta just barely twisted enough not to fall backwards, touching the fingertips of his left hand to the ground, gritting his teeth, and getting half a fistful of grass and mud before recovering, correcting, and tipping his head back with a bereaved exhale. The rain scattered across his skin and felt like a different experience altogether.</p><p>Jaehyun stood up against the other side of the passage as rainwater streamed between them, wings protecting his torso from the drizzle. His expression was utterly impassive, which half convinced Yuta that he was amused.</p><p>“Hush,” Yuta breathed, and Jaehyun’s brow crimped before smoothing back out.</p><p>“I didn’t say anything, “ Jaehyun mumbled, and Yuta began to exit the alleyway and its narrow flora.</p><p>“When do you ever,” Yuta negated flatly and ignored the way Jaehyun trailed behind him as if this were Yuta’s walk and he was merely the companion. There was a different air to being out of the room, though, and maybe that had been enough to calm him already.</p><p>Jaehyun breathed out through his nose, ungraceful for the cold.</p><p>“Does it matter which direction we go?” Yuta asked three steps into a main street until he pivoted before the literal river making its way down the Samgan pavement around its thick median strip. The entire city—every building face, plane, and nook—was enduring a cold sweat, and it was too dark to see any of the color Yuta had glimpsed before the sun had given up and gone down. Painted gray and black, it was like glistening ink art with watered-down strokes and charcoal nubs, interrupted with flood-resistant itea hugging the buildings and shrubbed bayberry and bamboo gnawing at the flow. The chilled plantlife were still somewhat fragrant, which Yuta knew now but might forget in a moment when his nose started running.</p><p>He recalled that there were paddy fields swathing just beyond the Samgan city stretch. Somewhere in this racist hellhole was a simple porridge that could kill the willpower of even the most conceited nobility.</p><p>“No,” murmured Jaehyun, so Yuta trudged up the street, scanning at windows, sloping roofs, bush-crowded crawl spaces, and alleyways that snuck into willows with rain skating through their leaves. The bamboo leant enough cover that he was relatively at ease, considering. </p><p>He let the rain wash over his hands.</p><p>Behind him, when he glanced that way, Jaehyun’s jaw was set against the cold.</p><p>Yuta could not focus on a single other detail across Jaehyun’s face for the reminder of the stolen dagger at his hip.</p><p>He brought his attention back forward and inhaled against the rain. His core was staying warm, and his fingers, back beneath his cloak and leather, skimmed the scabbard—still as simple as he remembered, but far more rigid than the average sheath. Everything told him this blade seemed to be important, and it made his palms buzz.</p><p>Scanning the skies for evidence of where the moon was, he tried to calculate just how much time he had as he turned southwest, closer toward the center. He walked with a purpose but tried not to splash against the cobblestones like a maddened goose.</p><p>Jaehyun seemed to catch on, coming close enough to Yuta within a few seconds that his breath of, “Have you been here before?” was inches away.</p><p>Yuta nearly startled, turning and seeing Jaehyun’s gaze just a little bare for once. An innocent question, lips dark with cold. Yuta almost stopped in his tracks and reeled that expression into his consciousness, as faded and blurred as it was by the darkness. “No,” he said, tearing himself away and continuing on his path. “No, I just know where smithies are kept.”</p><p>They didn’t have much time regardless of precise technicalities. Depending on the blacksmith Samgan kept, he could be running up against someone who rose before the asscrack of dawn to prepare for the day.</p><p>He’d been one of those people, once.</p><p>Beating the heat never failed to be a priority, and there was something life-bringing about the vivid colors of flame against a world steeped deep in navy.</p><p>He wanted to run for the center. There was so much room, too much stillness, so much latent energy sleeping low between the touches of each raindrop.</p><p>He continued to walk, glancing up at the enfeebled moon through the thick clouds as if it would slump miles down the sky every time he took three steps.</p><p>Surely Jaehyun could hear the minute sounds of a blade at his hip. Surely.</p><p>Forcing his breath steady as the roads finally opened up into the wider flora-drowned avenues, he could almost see where new walls were erected, demarcating where the court began. Smithies had to be accessible, so even the importance of the courts couldn’t claim them. No, one ought to be found next to where the markets and trading would happen, iron nails piled high in baskets, unbespoken miscellany laid out to draw in, always working behind the stall, always, always working.</p><p>His hands throbbed with it.</p><p>He threw his hood off—his braid hadn’t even dried while he’d slept anyway—and searched for the telltale black maw of its entrance, for the near feeling of metal and coal crawling through the water and leaves that he couldn’t explain. </p><p>All of his breath left him at once when he saw it through one of the bamboo gaps, unprotected for the respect of everything it brought. He switched directions fast enough that he saw Jaehyun tense in his periphery, though following as Yuta crossed through the heavy stream going strong on either side of the green strip. His boots were still wet too, anyway. Shoving himself out of the narrow passage between bamboo patches, he crossed the last stretch of pavement, then slid into the cold entrance. Everything within was dark and still as the rain drummed against the clay shingles and ran down the edges of the broad entrance. Yuta steadied himself and breathed in the differences. </p><p>The tree stump rooting the anvil home was broader than his, the anvil itself at an angle that forced his brain to remap, the finery older than Isdril’s was by the time it was rebuilt and became his. The wood bracings seemed an organic part of the stonework and clay, the cold ash on the floor and ledges brushed away in reveals of streaky sweeps, the tool bench, the hardy and pritchel holes—Yuta took a step back and heaved in an inhale, tasting the way earth ebbed and flowed in the darkness.</p><p>And then he used his hands. He skimmed his touch over drawers and hooks, bars and tongs, the tables and stations around the smithy, lifting his fingers and finding the faded shadows. It took him a minute to locate the waterstones, sitting on the table against the wall farthest from the finery and closer to the stairs, which was better for his sanity anyway. It took entire seconds of just holding his hand against one's clean and dry surface, blood swimming, before he remembered Jaehyun existed at all.</p><p>“Need anything sharpened?” Yuta asked—croaked, almost, and he had to clear his throat.</p><p>Jaehyun, not having moved farther into the smithy than just past the dripping <em> noren, </em>did nothing—not moving, not nodding, and Yuta could see nothing of his expression with the only light behind Jaehyun and blocked out by the roof. His wings had released their clasp around his body, protecting the heat of his back from the persistent drizzle coming in past the roof at a slant of a few inches.</p><p>Without pause and without warning even for himself, Yuta reached under his leather and cloak and unsheathed Jaehyun’s dagger in one smooth motion. “This?” he suggested in a whisper as he held it up and parallel to the floor, steady in his loose palm and offered, though pointed, in Jaehyun’s direction.</p><p>The exhale Jaehyun released was audible, and the dizziness in Yuta’s head returned. </p><p>He almost couldn’t feel the weight of the dirk like this, its balance so gorgeously professional that he was sure he really wouldn’t mind dying by it. The glint remained in the darkness like a breath descending down the steel as Yuta tilted it in his grip. Its line of script and scrawling embellishment laced through its pale glow.</p><p>“Have you straightened the edge since using this against me?” Yuta continued when faced with Jaehyun’s unmoving silence. “You should. If you want it to perform.”</p><p>“I didn’t,” Jaehyun rasped. “No.”</p><p>Nearly startled that Jaehyun had answered at all, Yuta tried to recall the feeling of its very tip against his carotid, under his eye, its swipe of silver in the open moonlight.</p><p>“May I?”</p><p>Jaehyun finally moved, his wings re-tidying themselves, and Yuta barely caught the flex of Jaehyun’s right hand, but his voice was easy even as it suffered. “Yeah.”</p><p>With that as permission, Yuta ran his fingertips along the bevel, checking for what kind of beating it might have taken. He grazed his thumb across the engravings as well and felt them buzz down his spine. Without letting the shadow that was Jaehyun leave his periphery, Yuta turned and set it on the work surface, heart beating out of his chest. “You left it in the room,” he explained as he knocked his fingers around for the medium stone.</p><p>The lack of response didn’t surprise him, but the rain outside the entry did double down and start sheeting again, wicking across the plants outside. The finery moaned listlessly with a pick of wind, and Yuta’s fingertips finally ran up against the right tool, just the right grain. He picked the waterstone up in his right hand, its heft pulling across the tendons of his wrist and forearm, and he moved for the entrance still holding it, unwilling to scrounge around in the dark for the blacksmith’s bucket.</p><p>There was a small twinge of peril approaching Jaehyun—like shale slipping under his boot. </p><p>It was warranted. </p><p>He dipped the hand holding the stone out into the rain to wet it, drew it back in, and whipped his right elbow toward Jaehyun’s face the moment Jaehyun reached out and touched his hip.</p><p>It was just hands—one of Jaehyun’s palms against the dripping waterstone to keep it from dropping when he grabbed him by the forearm, thumb digging into the knife there. It was just neutral enough that Yuta didn’t go for Jaehyun’s kidney with his left knuckles. The instinct stopped midway, his fingers a twitch away from Jaehyun's flinched wings.</p><p>“Don’t touch me,” Yuta whispered.</p><p>“I didn’t,” Jaehyun replied, tightening his grip on his forearm, finger by finger, then loosening like an ebbing wave. “I touched my belt.”</p><p>“Tell me what your blade says and I’ll give it back.”</p><p>Jaehyun’s short exhale through his nose was something Yuta could feel, ever so slightly, against his wrist. His hand wasn’t so far from Jaehyun’s face. “Why do you ever think you have the upper hand?” Jaehyun said, just soft enough that it flushed under the grating tiredness and came out gentle.</p><p>“Because you keep giving it to me.” Yuta lifted his free hand up and over to nudge Jaehyun’s grip off his arm with the backs of his knuckles. Jaehyun let go. “I’m just curious.”</p><p>“You’re not ‘just’ <em> anything,” </em>Jaehyun argued softly, and it dragged a laugh out of Yuta by the ears. “It’s my name.”</p><p>“‘Jaehyun’?” Yuta clarified, tugging on the waterstone and getting Jaehyun to let go like that. His skin prickled where they had touched.</p><p>“I answered your question.”</p><p>Again, Yuta laughed. “Fine.” He held the waterstone back out into the rain, letting Jaehyun be a motionless splotch of darker black he was now keeping waiting, then returned to the workbench. Only then did he drop his hands under his outer layers and unbuckle the belt and sheath. He didn’t cross back over to Jaehyun, opting to lure him in instead by holding it out and fixing the angle of the waterstone to where he wanted it on the tabletop.</p><p>“I’d rather not,” Jaehyun said after a pause.</p><p>Yuta looked over, and Jaehyun really hadn’t moved. He lowered Jaehyun’s scabbard, the buckle just tipping against the flagstones. “Why?”</p><p>He watched as Jaehyun’s head tilted, though it was hard to know with precision where he was indicating. Nonetheless, Yuta stiffened as his eyes swept the smithy, expecting to see the blacksmith standing in a corner of the room or the top of the stairs.</p><p>Instead, his gaze landed above the stairwell and froze there. </p><p>A grotesque simile crossed down his neck, shoulders, and back. He saw blood on the battlefield and tasted bile. </p><p>He put his brain on lock before it could go farther than that.</p><p>Without a word, he crossed over to Jaehyun and handed him his things.</p><p>He didn’t speak for the rest of the time, either, as he whetted the blade that was inscribed with Jaehyun’s name, then used the finishing stone. Years hadn’t ruined his instincts—he could still do this nearly with his eyes closed, at least. He cycled through with his <em> bi su </em> as well, listening to the rain to drown out the pale afterimage under his eyelids that he couldn’t banish from his upper periphery.</p><p>“Have you straightened the edge since using this against me?” echoed Jaehyun, tone matched, just as Yuta started gently moving his hands around for a honing compound and strop.</p><p>Yuta looked up and felt a small part of himself go through every single stage of grief seeing Jaehyun hold out his rondel, drawn silently while Yuta had been focused away from him. A different sort of unwanted thought trampled its way through his mind and left his teeth ringing.</p><p>“No,” Yuta said with a voice that had given out at the core.</p><p>The blade twitched in Jaehyun’s grip, a beckoning gesture. </p><p>Yuta wanted to tell Jaehyun to fuck right off and drown in a gutter. </p><p>He did not do that. He crossed back over, took the blade, and felt his slurry-stained fingertips go numb, not even registering its weight as he returned to the workbench and rested its bevel to the middle stone. Every pass over that, then the finishing stone made him feel like he was stripping his bones.</p><p>He’d had his rondel for a very brief amount of time. It did not feel familiar to him. It was beautifully crafted, and he wanted it like it wasn’t his, which contained enough meaning that he did not want to hold it.</p><p>Not right now.</p><p>Not with a trophy of war above the stairwell in the color of sawdust and freckles.</p><p>He found a wax bar, strop, and cloth, but he didn’t do more than wipe the blades down and gather the rest in a corner as he took the two stones he’d used out into the rain and let the steady downpour wash off the slurry.</p><p>“I’ll do the rest back in the room,” Yuta said, handing Jaehyun both daggers, then gathered the three components he felt no remorse in stealing, even from someone of his trade. “Let’s go back, if you’re well.”</p><p>This time, Yuta caught Jaehyun’s nod. He also caught the small shiver, which he’d otherwise been missing. Yuta, on the other hand, was chilled but not cold, even if he couldn’t feel his fingers or toes.</p><p>He bundled the cloth and wax in the strop, threw his hood up, and walked back out into the rain.</p><p>The image of Avia wings above the smithy stairs leaked like acid down his shoulder blades.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="big"><span class="u">Trivia:</span></span><br/><b>Waterproofing!</b> This isn’t something Yuta thinks about, so I’m just tossing some trivia out there. There are two options for waterproofing the wood in Samgan, and it’s tung oil or linseed oil. The tung oil tree is a southern China native. Linseed is just flax, and I’ve talked about that last chapter! Both are plausible waterproofing solutions, and it’s not consequential in Wist, so I’ll allow you guys to choose which one sounds cooler.</p><p><b>Flood-Resistant Plants!</b> I won’t go too deep into this—Yuta already listed a handful, but all the plants selected do very well in watery places, are tolerant to flooding, and are native to East Asia. All that being said, if you’re thinking about a watery mess of a geography, think less “wetlands” for this area. Samgan is still above the water table.</p><p><b>Smithy Things!</b> I’ll try to keep this brief: blacksmiths were priceless. They rarely wanted for anything, and that was at the very least brought on by their ability to make iron nails, which were invaluable. Finery forges were used in ancient China at least by the 3rd century BC. For most of that time, they were working with wrought iron, but methods were eventually developed to create steel (not going into that just yet if I don’t have to). I’ve decided that Wist is at that developmental point, but it’s not cheap.</p><p><b>Sharpening!</b> Steel in East Asia tends to be harder than steel in the west (out of preference and design), so instead of using honing steels, sedimentary waterstones would be used (namely in Japan). There were three main ones before we started getting fancy: rough stone, middle/medium stone, and finishing stone. Depending on what the blade needed for honing and straightening, different stones would be used. Yuta determined that the rough stone wasn’t necessary. There are more steps and nuances, but I didn’t want to go into too much detail.</p><p><b>Misc.!</b> Things like the <em>stump for the anvil:</em> traditionally, anvils were rooted in literal tree stumps. There are many, many reasons for this, but a big one is absorption and distribution of impact, which tree stumps do both exceptionally and naturally. Over time, the anvil fuses with the tree stump and more or less becomes one with it. <em>Anvil nuances:</em> Like hardy holes and pritchel holes. These are literal holes (the hardy is square) in the anvil used for many, many different purposes—punching, cutting, bending, twisting, etc. Anvils look very different across cultures, history, and trades. They do not necessarily look like the ones that are dropped on classic Western cartoon characters.</p><p>Feel free to bother me about any other nuances! I try to keep these relatively short, but then there’s things like limestone and clay roofing and traditional Korean homes and natural disaster architecture and stone vs wood buildings and—</p><p> <br/>Thank you to everyone who has been reading, commenting, and offering me support ;; ♡ It's a powerful motivator, and though I am . . . patently awful at replying consistently or at all, I read your comments almost as soon as I get them, and I am very grateful for you. Again, thank you.</p><p>
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<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Memories Are Written in the Bones</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>TW for some distressing but plain descriptions of prejudice and violent racism (fantasy, of course)<br/>CW for descriptions of severe pain and injury (unrelated to the above warning)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>“You’ve already broken him. He won’t be any use to you.” </em>
</p><p>The sword was awkward and strange in his hand, wobbly, rubbing in areas he didn’t have calluses and grating upon where he did. </p><p>He didn’t know any better, but she was a heartless teacher.</p><p>
  <em> The hallways carried sound, and she would have known this—he assumed she would have known with ears just like his. That from halfway across the pavilion, he could still hear his name resounding out from one entrance. </em>
</p><p>Thirteen and clipped, his balance could never be what she had with her trained muscles and brown eagle plumage. He could only scramble to keep his feet, to dodge and strain his weak wings to avoid bruises that would join his constant index. She never cut him.</p><p>Even “broken,” he was still valuable. Still beautiful. Still polished for appreciation and appraisal, a calculation of value and prestige. </p><p>
  <em> From one of the tea rooms daylit through paper and off of polished wood: voices, hard and cold. He was supposed to be elsewhere, but she’d said his name. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> “Give him a taste of freedom—just enough independence to make him cry for it.” </em>
</p><p>It took him a year to land a hit on her, and she broke his rib as punishment.</p><p>He’d known pain.</p><p>He learned fury.</p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Yuta was back to feeling like he wanted to curl up in bed and cease to exist.</p><p>Instead, he stopped halfway back to the inn, lagging for the realization that the Samganian bayberry bushes were spotted with fruit, and that he was just about dying.</p><p>Halfway there to ceasing to exist, he’d suppose.</p><p>The rain was verging on a torrent, and nature was being stripped of her chaff down the flow of the rebuilding rivers, but there were still swollen berries to pick deeper into the bushes. At about the size of his curled forefinger, a few would settle the acid in his stomach. If he remembered correctly, the dark ones were sweet, tart, and herbal—these were underripe and therefore unpicked, but certainly wouldn’t kill either of them.</p><p>Gathering his cloak to stop it from dipping into the water as he dropped to a high crouch, he used the one hand that wasn’t holding his stolen goods to pick what fruits hadn’t dropped off.</p><p>Jaehyun hesitated in his periphery, watching him wiggle one loose until the point that Yuta held it out for him, rain spilling down his arm.</p><p>“You’ve had these before, right?” Yuta mumbled, still trying to keep his voice down even as thunder reawoke in the skies. He let the bayberry roll into the center of his palm for Jaehyun’s appraisal.</p><p>He barely felt Jaehyun’s fingertips graze his skin as he reached out for it.</p><p>“Eat it carefully,” Yuta suggested. “There could be bugs.” With the fibrous, spiky makeup of the fruit, it was likely.</p><p>Jaehyun eyed him, looking rather birdlike for once with his dark-eyed wariness if it weren’t for the pink blotchiness of his face from the cold.</p><p>Yuta averted his gaze to let Jaehyun do whatever he wanted, reapplying himself to the bush and plucking a couple, then digging his teeth into the little rays of flesh, prying bits away with his teeth.</p><p>It was almost sour on his tongue, but sweet enough not to be tempted into a wince, and he spent a few seconds shoving the bits of fruit around looking for any pests before popping the rest. His mouth watered around it, which meant a healthy amount of fruit wouldn’t do too much, but they’d missed their chance to eat when they’d arrived.</p><p>And, last time Yuta had checked, he’d have to be more judicious about how much silver he had left. What he’d stolen from the fortress added to what he’d already had wouldn’t last a lifetime.</p><p>When Jaehyun dropped to a crouch a few feet from him, Yuta bit his lip around the urge to laugh—he wasn’t ignorant to Jaehyun seeming to be shy concerning food, or paranoid, or whatever he needed to be.</p><p>“We’re safe?” Yuta asked instead of laughing. “Do you hear anything?”</p><p>“Snoring,” Jaehyun said, dry among the sodden plants and pathways, and Yuta ducked his head to let that laugh loose, bitten and quiet as it was.</p><p>It hadn’t been too long since he’d last scavenged, but it had been a very long time since he’d had company while doing it. He had few good memories of either, welling up under his rain-riddled skin and wondering if he remembered perfectly the smarting of his skin as he once stripped nettle to boil. If he remembered every detail of his intestines gnawing at his pelvic floor.</p><p>He did.</p><p>He could feel the outer layer of cold stretching across the scarred knuckles of his hands, the stinging numbness at his fingertips, and the gap between him and Jaehyun as one of the Avia’s pinions dipped into the flow of water at their heels. Starvation didn't breed good memories, but this wasn't terrible.</p><p>It was only after a dozen or so yangmei that Jaehyun murmured that they ought to get back, though, bridging the cold between them with his half-warmed voice. “Someone’s woken up.” He nodded to one of the buildings across the verge, water making spikes out of his short eyelashes.</p><p>Yuta tucked his hands under his armpits, still clutching the strop, and stood, testing the crack of his knees. His mouth tasted less like sour dust, tongue and throat more forgiving, though he was colder now.</p><p>It was unlikely that the streets would bustle in this weather, but people were still at risk of looking out their windows, and Yuta was rarely keen to be seen regardless of whether curfew expired soon or not—he couldn’t know for sure, as the guards had opted to be unhelpful that way.</p><p>Without slipping in their mild haste, they found their way back easily enough. Jaehyun didn’t seem any more confused about which corners they had taken than Yuta was, and Jaehyun’s list of skills was getting inappropriately long with the addition of a sound memory and sense of direction.</p><p>But then there was the back wall, slick with rainwater, and Yuta’s fingers, numb and unreliable.</p><p>He breathed out his nose, considering their window, and he could feel Jaehyun’s eyes where they rested on the side of his hood.</p><p>Yuta turned his head to look at him. “If you give me my rondel, I can scale it,” he said under his breath, and Jaehyun considered him, rain making little pathways down his face to seemingly very little care from him at this point.</p><p>“Is that how you did it in Prinks?”</p><p>“Yes,” Yuta replied honestly, though his shoulder hadn’t been fucked at the time. His more crippled state was a combination of his own headassery and the weather, and that was on him. He’d had this injury for fifteen years and he still thought he was smarter than it.</p><p>Yuta held out his hand, testing with confidence the boundaries of Jaehyun’s rule-breaking earlier, and waited for Jaehyun to finish his requisite pause for thought.</p><p>The sound of Jaehyun drawing his rondel was audible this time, and it took willpower for Yuta not to close his eyes and savor it. Instead, he rued the way his skin prickled where the backs of Jaehyun’s nails grazed the skin of his palm, hilt settling in his grip.</p><p>He’d asked for it, but he still hated what the silent allowance meant. </p><p>He curled his fingers around his rondel and ignored Jaehyun in favor of the wall. Using his one free hand and half his fingers from his right, he rolled the strop and its contents up tightly and shoved it under the belt of his pants, cold fingertips threatening his skin. </p><p>Parts of him wanted to invoke a return of respect he’d given Jaehyun while they’d foraged, asking him to look away, but the other parts realized this was going to be bad either way.</p><p>The inn would have to forgive this mysterious vandal.</p><p>Knowing the sod was slippery, he didn’t bother with a running start, walking up to the wall’s face and getting as much height as he could with a single jump and just his right arm to swing him.</p><p>He raised his left arm in a single, black-spotted action and scrabbled to find an edge in the slatted wood that would hold him. With sheer willpower, he gritted his teeth and pulled as soon as he found the tiniest crack—before his shoulder had the option to give out. He failed to register the ringing of his dagger for the ringing in his ears as he yanked it out of the woodwork, and repeated the action with the added leverage of his sullied boots.</p><p>His vision almost certainly went gray—even less color than the storm was affording—and he was one blink away from blacking out, but he got his left arm hooked into the window sill and that was all he needed. Even as pain turned the muscles of his back inside out and told him that he could kiss a quick recovery goodbye, he at least wouldn’t slip down the wall and crack his skull on the earth.</p><p>He found the energy to tamp his rondel on his thigh the second time as he pulled himself in through the window. His shoulder screamed, the hurt yanking at every bone in his ribcage and tasting his spine with its teeth, agony radiating up his neck and across his face.</p><p>His next breath as he hit the floor was ragged, the dark room swinging dangerously, and every fiber of his being wanted him to curl up there and drive his forehead into the slats for the reprieve of unconsciousness.</p><p>Instead, he staggered to his feet, tossed the rondel onto Jaehyun’s saddlebags, and yanked his leather and cloak off to fumble with the latch of his <em>bi su </em>sheath as his shoulder washed itself over in waves of heat and a burning frigidity. He could feel his left hand twitching, every muscle flinching through the freeze and scalding, and his vision stung and wavered as his leg began to answer the trauma, throbbing and challenging his knee.</p><p>Too dizzy to care about the smell of ash and mountains that probably got Jaehyun in through the window behind him, Yuta kicked out of his boots and let himself fall to his knees on the mattress. He could taste blood in his mouth that wasn’t real, other types of memories echoing through his body and making his lungs seize.</p><p>He sat back on his heels and reeled in breath after breath as his sheath fell to the abandoned blankets and the pain dared him to cry.</p><p>“We should have risked the entrance,” Yuta teased, but it trembled out of his mouth. He was almost too afraid to touch his own muscles. Instead, he reached for the end of his braid and tugged on the string until he could jerk each strand out of its weave, then hold onto his own scalp and sink his face into the mattress.</p><p>He shuddered through each inhale, left hand open and cradled in his lap through the jerking tremors, and stifled the heat in his eyes with the blankets and his damp hair, pulling at his roots with his fingers, until the waves of panic and pain ebbed—if only slightly.</p><p>Never once did Jaehyun speak or touch him, for which Yuta was dizzyingly grateful. He wouldn’t have wanted to admit that everything hurt.</p><p>They could have gone through the entrance, he could have asked Jaehyun for a leg up, they could have figured something out, but he hadn’t <em> wanted </em> to. He chose every mistake.</p><p>“Is there anything I can do?” Jaehyun asked, voice from the corner of the room and only after Yuta was no longer on the cusp of hyperventilating.</p><p>“Not really,” Yuta managed. “No.”</p><p>He’d taken medicines before in Isdril when his body suffered an almost mental relapse, but his lucidity had taken a hit and everything suffered for it. In medication’s absence, he otherwise simply tried to be careful, because if he behaved, and he didn’t push, his shoulder could almost be normal again. He’d only felt the repercussions of Prinks after he’d done the damage—sometimes, it was almost as if the injury weren’t there.</p><p>Carefully, he sank onto his right side and applied a gentle touch to his shoulder, still ringing with pain but no longer blinding him. His hair was in his face, but he didn’t mind the reduction to his sight. The cool strands were soothing against the heat of his skin and neck.</p><p>“Does your—” Yuta pulled in another breath, the words having reached his lips before he truly thought about them, but he let the rest out. “—hip ever hurt?”</p><p>Jaehyun, on the ground with his knees to his chest and wings hugging him like a draping blanket, was watching him from the near corner—gently, perhaps, though Yuta’s sight was still suffering from the reverberations of pain up his neck.</p><p>Jaehyun didn’t answer for a long time, Yuta given company from only the quieting thud of his adrenaline-suffering heart, the squeeze of his lungs, and the tireless rain outside the inn window. He didn’t mind so much. He’d gotten used to Jaehyun taking his time.</p><p>“My wings do,” Jaehyun said just as Yuta felt his mind start to buckle under a haze—fatigue digging its nails into his body for the inch of mercy it provided.</p><p>“Why don’t you use them more?” Yuta breathed, eyelids dropping. “They’re beautiful.”</p><p>He could only really hear rain.</p><p>“Thank you.”</p>
<hr/><p>The Isdril smithy had once had entire generations within its confines. There were handprints of varying sizes in the upper clay of the finery—from his great-great-grandfather’s six-year-old palm and digits to his great-great-great-grandmother’s daunting paw. His fingers had been as long as hers at nineteen, but his palms had to hitch up against the divots with an inch at his heel like a laugh from a woman he’d never met. The finery burned every day at dawn like a pyre of incense for them. Created, formed, endured by a genuine ancestry. </p><p>His mother was the bearer of the trade, his father an interloper whose first real creation had been a leather brand of her name, which he swore he would apply to his ass if she agreed to marry him. Only one of those things happened, but the brand remained as an irreverent poker even as he moved on to create finer things.</p><p>Each blacksmith had their own tools. It was their first real test of skill and proficiency. Upon infirmity, retirement, or passing, those tools were then strung up to the proofed wooden rafters like characters laid out to read. An incomprehensible lullaby that formed Yuta’s bones.</p><p>There were notches in the wood of the leftmost wooden pillar that kept the roof up—his mother’s father’s height marked up by year. “The tallness skipped him,” she said, which was an immortalized truth.</p><p>Or thought to be immortalized.</p><p>The stones had been worn and stained, the stump that held the anvil covered in etchings, the finery roaring and whispering history like a placid and tempered old beast who had raised, sustained, created.</p><p>At twenty-seven, Yuta faced the smithy and felt his body bleed itself apart.</p><p>Seeing it for the first time in eight years had been like having his head pushed into a body of water and being forced to drown.</p><p>The finery had cracked—he’d known this, seen it, felt its edges under his fingertips at nineteen with his right hand because his left was too painful to lift—and so it was mostly gone, reshaped, reformed, refined. Everything the smithy was from the inside out was new. From the <em> noren </em> to the beams. When he would search it later, he wouldn’t find even the gentlest of traces.</p><p>And she’d stood there. An Avia who held her own tools above a stump so scorched that it only remained to anchor the anvil. An Avia, of all people, with wings so gray they were almost blue at the shoulders, black and white at the pinions and tail, not even seeing him for her work as she used her flatter.</p><p>There was nothing like seeing an Avia in the ruined embrace of his ancestors, ruined by hands like hers, sources like hers, fires she was kindling, metal she was shaping. </p><p>He’d strode in, grabbed with both hands the straight-peen sledgehammer that was left on a new table halfway between the entrance and the forge, and slammed it down on the blade she had just cool enough to not bend, but break. It shattered in half with a spray of hammerscale and sparks.</p><p>She’d yanked herself away, tripping from the anvil with her tools half-raised.</p><p>He remembered what he’d said to her, but she’d forgiven him for it since.</p><p>He’d asked her to.</p>
<hr/><p>Yuta woke up alone.</p><p>It was easy to tell after a week of being cradled by someone else’s body—he was accustomed to a certain kind of heat, a mugginess, the pressure of Jaehyun’s legs and the weight of his arm. If not through touch, he was used to the smell of Jaehyun and the sound of his breath, and he simply wasn’t there.</p><p>He couldn’t tell if it was still raining, but eyes open, headache blurring out half of his vision, it was still dark enough to know that the clouds hadn’t parted. Water rushed audibly outside, so nothing really mattered either way.</p><p>He first felt something irrational, unwelcome. He acknowledged the chill second, the sluggish feel of his blood, and four layers across his legs up to his waist in two blankets, his cloak, and the leather. His shoulder was numb until he tried to move it, then needled a reprimand so sharp nearly straight through his heart that he gasped and squeezed his eyes shut again.</p><p>Five heartbeats later, he braced himself and crawled his right arm under himself to push up onto his elbow and check if Jaehyun had truly left.</p><p>In a sense of permanence, he hadn’t, saddlebags and laid-out clothes still present. The pin was the greater surprise, its dart of copper set neatly on the mattress where Jaehyun would have been.</p><p>He’d left every possible evidence that he would be returning shy of leaving a note.</p><p>Yuta got himself up to a sit, cradling his arm into his lap and recalling the state of his hair only as it slipped forward. His head pounded with regret.</p><p>There were a few wagerable guesses for where Jaehyun had gone, but Yuta’s heartbeat had taken residence up in his skull and thinking seemed a greater feat than reasonable when he didn’t feel immediately threatened.</p><p>His mouth and throat took priority, demanding water that was on the other side of the room.</p><p>He’d been nearly incapacitated enough times in his life that his irritation was worn for how long it took him to get onto his knees, then his feet, blinking through the shivering protests of the shoulder he’d fucked over all on his own.</p><p>There was enough feeble light that Yuta could both see and feel the dried mud on the floor that either he or Jaehyun had tracked in, and the cold began to cascade its way through his body with his trek for his waterskin.</p><p>He pulled what food he had left out too and eased himself back down to the edge of the room’s mattress, taking stock of the same things occupying the space—saddlebags, deep window eave, blankets, clothes, a stark absence of Jaehyun. All wood and some stone and very few living things.</p><p>Whatever feelings of freedom that could be expected from being relieved of his self-chosen Avia burden were heavily dampened by the fact that Yuta actively did not want to be conscious. He was in a state of wakefulness, though, that he knew from experience would only give him nightmares if he tried to push himself under again.</p><p>He bit into a dried plum and held it in his mouth for the sensation of it.</p><p>Over the course of fifteen years, he’d been in varying states of company or solitude, from a group just trying to survive to utter, mind-breaking loneliness. The first few days of being alone after having a companion or many had always been hard. Yuta’s mind tended to lose traction, priorities and time slipping through his fingers, his attentiveness morphing from curiosity to something base and simply sufficient.</p><p>He enjoyed people.</p><p>He knew this about himself.</p><p>He just hated losing them, and hated being known, torn open slowly, pushed to bending, tugged on and finding himself more malleable than he knew was safe. He hated knowing them. Loving them was within his capacity, and he knew its damage.</p><p>Over fifteen years, he’d lost more people than the trauma in his body could remember and lost himself a hundred times over that.</p><p>Jaehyun was his first companion in five years. </p><p>It showed.</p><p>Yuta’s shoulder sheath and <em> bi su </em>were situated neatly at the opposite corner of the bed. He could almost see Jaehyun’s pathways in his imagination—the waiting game he had probably played, waiting to be sure that Yuta was unconscious before figuring out what to do, moving about the room, collecting and reshuffling blankets and layers of clothing.</p><p>Or maybe he’d crawled into bed for a time.</p><p>There was no way to know, and the odds of Jaehyun telling him were abysmal. If, of course, Jaehyun’s lonely tryst had him returned in one piece.</p><p>Yuta could see the wings in the smithy perfectly, like mold in the corner of a home as the owners mimicked cleanliness.</p><p>His partner in Isdril . . . she’d said that early on in the war, people would try to yank out her feathers. Just <em> people </em> as she passed by or tried to do her work. People she thought she knew, people she didn’t. They would tear out her feathers when they could and call for the peacekeep to cut her open or put her down.</p><p>He’d seen it in different colors in Isdril.</p><p>Both children and adults would throw things—the kids chose rocks, their parents chose her work or her tools if she allowed them into the smithy. She’d had to make a new handle for one of her hammers after a customer threw it into the forge and told her to retrieve it with her bare hands.</p><p>People had tried to poison her, so she wouldn’t accept gifts. She wouldn’t look at most people unless they told her to, and even then they hated it.</p><p>There had been break-ins to the upper floor of the smithy to hurt her, to steal from her. There had been dead birds on her worktables and agitant powders spread over her tools.</p><p>She’d avoided all the blows she could and withstood every jeer and slur.</p><p>It had taken Yuta too long to speak up or lash out at people instigating for rotten catharsis. He’d been there. He’d hated her. He’d told her to die. He’d gotten drunk and tried to kill her himself. He called her a murderer and a whore and it had taken months upon months to learn that she, too, had already died several times over.</p><p>She, too, felt pain.</p><p>She had made beautiful things.</p><p>And she’d forgiven him, and he didn’t know how.</p><p>So in Samgan, Yuta could feel the stirrings of worry clashing with a founded sense of assurance in Jaehyun’s competency. He recognized that the thought of Jaehyun returning with a single feather missing might make him see red, though, and Yuta wasn’t sure if he regretted this development.</p><p>He was rather sure that Jaehyun deserved to be alive. He was also sure of other things, but would rather not acknowledge them.</p><p>Instead, he tugged blankets over his lap, ate slowly for a stomach pinched with pain, and waited. His left hand was cold and numb, viscerally upset with him with two broken nails and small cuts in the edges of his calluses. He couldn’t braid his hair well one-handed and was too tired to attempt it, so he did his best to detangle his hair from root to tip with his fingers and relax his body bit by bit to the extent that he was able.</p><p>After what felt like ages, Jaehyun returned through the door.</p><p>He did not look at all surprised to see Yuta sitting up, acknowledging him instantly and placidly with a sort of quiet and composed expression that Yuta found familiar but not. Like it was necessary, Jaehyun paused after closing the door and just stood there, letting Yuta look at him.</p><p>He appeared fine, if not exhausted in the hard creases and bruises of his eyes and a little unkempt in the lines of his clothes compared to what Yuta knew he could be.</p><p>He also looked dry from the weather and was carrying a sling laden with something unbeknownst.</p><p>“Welcome back,” Yuta said.</p><p>Jaehyun seemed to take that as permission to properly step into the room. “Thank you,” he said with a voice fully warmed, and with those words, Yuta just barely remembered letting something slip from his mouth that he shouldn’t have—would never have, if he hadn’t been nearly delirious.</p><p>It registered with something like dread.</p><p>“What time is it?” Yuta asked blindly as he grappled with that fresh feeling of a mistake.</p><p>“Daytime,” Jaehyun said. “I’m not sure.” He lowered the sling to the ground near Yuta’s knee to the sound of silver first, then whatever else was in it. Food wrapped in leaves, fresh, just marring Jaehyun’s oil smell with the scent of mushrooms and rice.</p><p>Jaehyun sat himself to the ground on the other side of the bag—not the mattress—and close enough to touch. Yuta could easily reach his knee, and if he leaned, he could have grazed Jaehyun’s left wing.</p><p>Yuta wasn’t sure what kinds of words were in his mouth, but he didn’t like them, so he reached out to sift his touch through the wrappings, then the silver. Jaehyun didn’t watch him, eyes resting around the window.</p><p>The silences Jaehyun managed to establish had often been comfortable, but this one felt different. They were in a small square of a room, rivers flowing outside, Yuta crippled and Jaehyun looking seconds away from ossifying, and this silence felt genuinely peaceful.</p><p>It was something Yuta rarely experienced, and he doubted he would have guessed it to happen now.</p><p>He was not strong in the face of good things, however.</p><p>“Did you sell your body for this?”</p><p>Jaehyun gave that little exhale out of his nose and passed his gaze over to Yuta. “Maybe,” he said without an inch of stiffness or insult. “That money should help tie us over, and the weather’s let up if we want to leave.”</p><p>Yuta stared at him, and Jaehyun let it happen.</p><p>“I was joking,” Yuta said numbly, and the corner of Jaehyun’s mouth lifted—almost like a smirk, but without the arrogance. Either way, it was the first Yuta had seen of something like it. What Jaehyun had done to the guards hadn’t counted the way this did.</p><p>“I thought so,” said Jaehyun.</p><p>Then it was gone, and Yuta wanted it back.</p><p>“Do you want to leave?” Jaehyun continued, face straight, and Yuta wanted to touch him. He wanted it back. It wasn’t dizzying, but the want was singular and loud.</p><p>“Aren’t you tired?” Yuta felt only partially present when he asked that question, then was hit by a keen sense of deja vu.</p><p>“No,” Jaehyun answered. That had to be a lie, but he was already getting back up to his feet. He was wearing his bracers, and it wasn’t until he moved that Yuta could catch the small tail of magic. His gut swooped but didn’t drop.</p><p>Jaehyun had said he wouldn’t. It had to have been for while he was gone.</p><p>“Let’s get out of here,” Yuta said, then. His shoulder was a problem, but he didn’t want to force Jaehyun to be in Samgan any longer than necessary—he hardly wanted to force himself.</p><p>Jaehyun graced him with a confirming glance as he crouched for his saddlebags. Yuta saw mostly wing and was again reminded of what he’d said. He would take it back if he could. “Okay,” Jaehyun said. “Let’s.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="big"><span class="u">Trivia:</span></span><br/><b>Foraging!</b> <em>Bayberries</em> first! If you thought I made these up, you were <em>wrong!</em> No shame though. These are super cool and sound super tasty. Some people have compared them to strawberries. I’ve dwarfed the <em>myrica rubra</em>, which is what this is directly referencing. It’s a subtropical Chinese tree (shrub in Wist) that grows the “yumberry” (this is the common name, though there’s a TON), which is soaked in saltwater to remove any pests or dirt. Now, <em>nettles!</em> These are seriously all over, but the <em>gansuensis</em> subspecies in East Asia would be the specific one Yuta’s recalling. Not all nettles have stinging hairs, but these do, and they can be eaten after being soaked in water or cooked, which removes the stinging chemicals.</p><p><b>Noren!</b> This one’s left over from last time—my apologies. These are traditional Japanese hangings and can come in various forms. The most common are simple cloth dividers with slits all the way up the fabric. They’re traditionally hung down in the entrances/just outside the entrance of shops and used for decoration, practicality, shielding from weather, keeping heat in, and labeling the building. In chapter 12, the smithy’s noren is inappropriately still up—traditionally, they are always taken down at the end of the day. This is to preserve them and the aspect of history they contain. This can reflect on the Samgan smithy in a number of ways. Perhaps the blacksmith doesn’t respect their history, perhaps they are forgetful, perhaps, perhaps. It doesn’t matter much. It’s a very small detail.</p><p>I don’t think I’m missing anything?? There wasn’t a ton in this chapter to elaborate on, but if you think I’m wrong, please bother me for information! I do not mind rambling more!</p><p>Thank you for reading ;; and my apologies for the late update!!! I should be back on schedule from now on until I say otherwise =] ♡</p><p>
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<a name="section0014"><h2>14. You're Warmer Than the Cold Lets On</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I'll update on schedule next week, then I should be taking another break to briefly work on some other projects. I'll let you guys know if that'll be one or two weeks of break!</p><p> </p><p>TW for Jae's prelude: blood, injury, violence against a minor</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>He was a threat at eleven when he struck back at the clipping, and then he wasn’t anymore, which they—the wife and husband foremost—discovered was less ideal than they thought once certain plans started to gain traction. Docileness gave them a badge, like a shine to their image and nothing more. </p><p>He was pushed in stages, moderated in different ways. At fourteen they switched from sedation to cords, putting hands in places he wished they wouldn’t. They cut a pin feather on purpose that year just to see what would happen.</p><p>When he curled up, closed his eyes, and held his breath as blood slicked down his plumage, his life pivoted. They didn’t clip him again until he was eighteen, nineteen, and it wasn’t because they thought he would escape, but for the way it made him scream.</p><p>That was a sound they reacquainted themselves with when he was fifteen, when he started to carry a note of defiance. He knew it was what they wanted, but it was difficult to dig his fingers into reality either way.</p><p>It was the first time he’d ever had his magic drawn from him, and it started with something so plain. Just a steel dagger. </p><p>“The handle is birch from Avira and bone under the shagreen,” the man had said. He’d held it under Yoonoh’s nose and turned it for him, gently, carefully. The blade was uninscribed, the entire thing almost as long as Yoonoh’s forearm if he could have compared—if he hadn’t been tied back and down to the floor. “Ideally, it would have been your bone, but we made do with someone else’s.”</p><p>That detail, utterly unnecessary, had drawn a beat of fear from him. A blatant thud in his throat not unlike all the nameless anxieties he’d kept between his teeth his entire life.</p><p>He hadn’t been warned. There was no reason to tell him. It would have dampened the shock and the pain of it, the sudden shriek that ripped up his side and through his thigh three seconds too late when the man sliced him at the hip with little more than a blink.</p><p>Yoonoh’s sources kicked in, scrabbling at the air for direction and against the stone basement walls, blooming behind his veins and pushing at his skin. </p><p>And then he felt all that energy get hooked. Neatly.</p><p>A little tug. Like someone had pulled at his pinky finger as his world blurred for bleeding.</p><p>He saw the source lines glowing across the man’s face like a written-out fever even though there were no limbs between his shoulders. He saw the way the dagger hovered around his navel, bejeweled with garnet red.</p><p>When the man yanked back on the dagger, away from Yoonoh’s body, Yoonoh had screamed then. Then, for the taste of his insides seizing, for the stringent smell of burning magic, for the touch of agony rooted in his thighs and arms.</p><p>His energy left him all at once, sucked through his bones and right through his hip like a spigot shattering.</p><p>“Ah, he’s a bit beautiful like that,” he heard somewhere as tears and sweat ran down his neck, blood drooling down the skin of his thigh, eddying around every hair. He could never remember whether it was the wife or the messenger. Sometimes it was the de-winged doctor or the husband.</p><p>Either way, they had it engraved with his name, and he next saw it in the hands of the messenger. </p><p>He couldn’t walk. </p><p>She told him a small wound was hardly a good enough excuse to skip a lesson.</p>
<hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>A wind was picking up as they left through the east gate, tamer inside Samgan’s walls than a single step outside them. The guards did a double-take at Jaehyun leaving, likely startled that he had existed within their limits for even a day. Jaehyun, as usual, didn’t acknowledge the attention, which meant that Yuta had every reason to lead his horse into their line of sight to block even a portion of their viewing pleasure.</p><p>Mounting was excruciating for Yuta, so he hoped the guards were distracted by that. He didn’t miss the way Jaehyun hesitated with a glance before mounting his own, but Yuta was grateful he didn’t make any offer. Though Jaehyun’s track record so far was to keep his distance, the temperature between them was changing or complicating or <em> something, </em> making Yuta cling to Jaehyun’s nonintervention in the hopes it would persist.</p><p>On this side of Samgan, the forest had petered out for flooded meadows with gradual slopes, soon to segue into paddies. The green of grassy tussocks and sedge, cold hyacinth and reeds was vivid under the muted and dark skies. In absence of rain, the wind did twice the work in making everything colder as the watar and fields rippled. Yuta had his leather, and Jaehyun had nothing. He couldn’t wrap his wings around himself because they were on a main road, regardless if there wasn’t anyone yet to see it.</p><p>The edges of Jaehyun’s folded wings made new shapes against every blow of wind, like brushstrokes flicking out of order. Yuta watched if only because it was an effective distraction against how his entire torso was sore in different ways right up to the base of his skull. He wasn’t unnerved by the full-body result of his mistakes—he’d been here, done this at least half a dozen times throughout his relationship with his shoulder—but it was a different experience entirely when horse riding. Especially so when his mare was somewhat bothered by the weather, a little less steady for all the ways the persistent wind messed with her senses.</p><p>It wouldn’t be a day Jaehyun and he would talk much, if at all. Jaehyun would have to raise his voice for Yuta to hear him, and he was already careful to speak. The cold made Yuta feel like he was narrowing down, anyway, mind stabilizing to a dull, finite point. With the tosses of wind, white noise at the edge of his hood, and the cold trying to creep through what skin he had bare, he was locked in for endurance.</p><p>As far as attention to detail went, that wasn’t beneficial.</p><p>They’d passed into the paddy fields by the time Yuta caught anything, no more than an hour in. It was minor—just a moment a heavier gust made Jaehyun’s knees tighten, hugging his horse’s flank as air caught under his wings despite the tight fold. It was the first time Yuta had seen a lapse in his small array of perfect horse-riding postures, from relaxed to sturdy. This one had him close to pulling on the reins, a little physical anxiety or slip in composure.</p><p>With a small tap and a wrinkle of stress licking up his abdomen that he ignored, Yuta fell in at Jaehyun’s side rather than behind him—he was used to Jaehyun denying him this angle and had defaulted, but he had a feeling it would be acceptable now.</p><p>Unabashed, Yuta looked him over before speaking. There was a cold flush that had worked up Jaehyun’s neck, face wind-bitten, Jaehyun’s eyes were closed with a little knot between his eyebrows, and his hands looked worse for wear.</p><p>As if Jaehyun could sense it after enough time, Yuta’s assessment drew his eyes open and over. The motion was slow and unfocused, and Jaehyun didn’t turn his head or body, more tense than Yuta had given him credit.</p><p>“You should wrap up,” Yuta said, having bitten his tongue around the options he had for phrasing: a directive, a question, a request. He’d gone with the first, obviously, and only because he wanted to be forthright. “The blankets will do,” he suggested. “Drape one like a scarf or something. You can use mine for your waist.” Jaehyun was already wearing the one belt around his waist to keep his shirt down, but it wasn’t enough.</p><p>The words felt clumsy, or maybe Yuta’s lips were just cold. Jaehyun’s core had to stay warm. That was the bottom line.</p><p>Jaehyun was taking longer to respond than he normally did, and Yuta watched Jaehyun’s gaze search over his expression. A shiver crawled through Jaehyun’s body, visibly raising the feathers of his coverts. “Jaehyun,” Yuta tried again, firmer this time. He almost flinched when Jaehyun did, startled by Jaehyun’s reaction to his own name that he hadn’t given in some time. It really had been more like a cringe, or a balking if he weren’t so stiff, like Yuta had been too loud for him too suddenly.</p><p>“Sorry,” Yuta said, though still not totally sure for what, and reached across his body with his right hand to tug on Jaehyun’s reins to get him to pause, physically stop, and listen. He received no resistance for it from Jaehyun or the horses, and he could now see Jaehyun’s hands shaking. “We need to get blankets for you,” he told him and tried to be gentle while still loud enough for an Avia to hear him over the wind. “Okay?”</p><p>He watched Jaehyun blink, his eyes still slipping over Yuta’s face like he was looking at a drawing. Jaehyun inhaled but said nothing, and Yuta thought he saw something familiar. It made his stomach hollow out.</p><p>With significant pain and effort, Yuta dismounted in the middle of the empty road. No one else was out in this weather—it was biting, overbearing, and bad for the horses.</p><p>Jaehyun probably wasn’t so different.</p><p>Jaehyun watched him, his wind-lashed hands splotchy and shaking, and Yuta beckoned him down. “Get off,” Yuta said, biting his tongue around the word <em> now. </em></p><p>Yuta tried not to wait for him to do so, opening up his saddlebags to wrestle out his blanket one-handed while his chest twinged numbly at the pull. He heard Jaehyun dismount and saw it in his periphery, the clumsy hit of his soles against the sodden road, the way he stumbled—truly stumbled—as if he’d been woken up in the middle of the night.</p><p>If Yuta had to guess, Jaehyun was both mentally slipping from the stress of the wind on his senses and getting dangerously close to the onset of hypothermia. Yuta didn’t know why he didn’t have thicker clothes or more layers or what Jaehyun would do if he were alone and faced with this weather.</p><p>He said, “I’m going to touch you, okay?” and felt the iciness of Jaehyun’s skin, his jaw and cheek, as he lifted the blanket around his head, still one-handed, and wrapped it around his neck.</p><p>Jaehyun’s fingers bumped his forearm, then met the wool, and he shuddered with cold in front of Yuta, eyes dull. His touch had been frigid, staining Yuta’s skin through his shirt.</p><p>There was a part of Yuta that wanted to raise his hands and press them to Jaehyun’s ears, blocking out some of the sound as it bullied its way across the meadows and rice fields. Another part of him wondered why Jaehyun hadn’t stopped at the start to either turn back around or think of the blankets on his own.</p><p>He’d survived this long, hadn’t he?</p><p>Yuta had his hair draped around his neck, twisted at the side and under his ear to not fall into his face, warm under his hood and keeping his pulse sound. His hands were bare, but he could hide them under his layers. He had his second pair of socks on for the sake of warmth despite the risk that the rain might start up again. </p><p>The cold had come fast and early, but Yuta’s mind still whirred over why he had to do this.</p><p>He was already resigned to the fact that he simply was.</p><p>“Fix that for me,” Yuta said then passed for Jaehyun’s saddlebags to find the blanket there. “Pull it over your head to block out some of the wind, s—” He stopped there, holding his tongue, and finally got the latch of the saddlebag undone. He’d gotten lucky in that this one did in fact hold Jaehyun’s blanket, and he found nothing else immediately of interest in the contents tucked below it as he pulled out the wool. Not that this was the moment.</p><p>When he turned, Jaehyun had wrapped it like a thick scarf, covering everything from his nose and ears to the top of his chest and shoulders.</p><p>He let Jaehyun do the second blanket himself this time, holding it out for him until he grabbed it. “Waist,” Yuta said pointedly, though Jaehyun’s hands were a concern as well. He looked at Jaehyun’s cold-locked fingers as they tucked the blanket obediently, hesitated, then pulled his own shirt out of his saddlebags.</p><p>Jaehyun’s other shirt was the embroidered one—the nicer, cotton one he’d likely worn at the court in Prinks. “Hands,” Yuta said tersely, feeling like an anatomist as he shoved it into Jaehyun’s loose grip.</p><p>And then he got back on his horse, though it almost wrestled a groan from his throat to do so. He should have fashioned a sling for his arm, but he hadn’t given it enough thought. He couldn’t judge Jaehyun for not thinking ahead when he had his own brands of neglect.</p>
<hr/><p>The sky only cleared up in patches, then rolled back over into gray, though the cover wasn’t dark enough to raise any immediate alarms. Yuta’s shoulder couldn’t be counted for accuracy given its general state of tenderness, so he begged the air for luck. The thought of it coming down again in rain or hail made Yuta consider swifter deaths. </p><p>There were houses every handful of miles, and he could see snatches of people sneak out of the walls for whatever they needed, then disappear back inside in smudges of brown. His eyes were tired, and Jaehyun was still obviously cold.</p><p>The next patch of sky he saw told him it was getting dark, and there were still only gradual and flooded hills, gentle terraces, and stretch upon stretch of paddies.</p><p>The night would only be colder.</p><p>Instead of saying his name, Yuta looked at Jaehyun in the temple until Jaehyun looked back. He turned this time, just slightly, gaze stirring out of monotony and into something more alert. He no longer looked overwhelmed—or at least not as much.</p><p>“We need to ask for shelter,” he said and didn’t have to wait longer than two seconds before Jaehyun nodded. His hair had long since slipped out of order, its straight strands in a tousled disarray that skated across his face for a moment as a wind picked up at them across the side. Jaehyun squinted his eyes to avoid it.</p><p>They’d have the greatest chance of success if Jaehyun was the one who knocked. People were less likely to say no to an Avia’s face if they walked up to their doorstep. It wasn’t about respect or shame. It was about fear. Avia weren’t known to assert themselves, and commonfolk feared death.</p><p>“Are you up to doing it?” Yuta asked and watched Jaehyun consider the question. Jaehyun tested the flexibility of his hands under the wrappings of Yuta’s shirt, having accepted the offer without complaint.</p><p>Taking shelter in someone else’s home was awful for many, many reasons when Yuta was alone. The thought of adding Jaehyun to the mix doubled down on Yuta’s reservations. A collection of possible events rolled through the headache Yuta had been suffering since waking.</p><p>He saw Jaehyun nod again, though, and resigned himself to the knot in his stomach as the house in the distance gained more detail. It was raised, square, and with a rice-straw roof—much the same as any home for miles that he would see in this region. Its wood and clay would be warm enough, and the bodies inside it would make it more so.</p><p>That didn’t mean he truly wanted it.</p><p>It took Yuta a moment to gather the courage to dismount. The effort of doing it again was going to kill him, and he had half a mind that he shouldn’t do it until he was positive Jaehyun was successful.</p><p>He froze when he felt Jaehyun touch his knee, hand bare. “Stay,” Jaehyun said simply and gave him the two blankets and his shirt back. Yuta could imagine his reasons, and so stifled the tiny collection of defiances he was tempted into. He’d ordered Jaehyun around at the beginning of the day. Jaehyun could reserve this right.</p><p>Yuta traced the lines of Jaehyun’s wince when he tweaked his wings out a few inches on his walk up the raised bund that led to the home. Yuta knotted his hands in the warmth of the cloth Jaehyun had abandoned, tucking them under the layers of his cloak and leather as he watched the wind flip up the edge of Jaehyun’s shirt below his belt. He could almost see skin.</p><p>He waited, feeling the horse shift under him, her shivers subtle. They’d have to tuck the horses into the lee of the house where its under-garden stifled the wind and gave off more warmth than the water of the taro on the west side would. If they left the blankets with the horses, who hadn’t yet grown any winter coat, they would be fine, and what grasses Yuta could see riddling the edges of the fields would be sufficient if they needed it.</p><p>He almost forgot to watch Jaehyun when the door of the home opened—almost forgot to watch him use his wings again in the interesting, manipulative way he did, each gentle shift and adjustment like a fourth dimension of expression. It looked polite, but Yuta doubted it was if it served as intentional a purpose as it seemed. </p><p>Yuta couldn’t remember if he’d seen Jaehyun do that to him the scarce number of times they’d crossed paths before Prinks. He certainly hadn’t seen him do it since then.</p><p>Hearing anything was beyond his ability over the wind, but he could see Jaehyun lean in ever so slightly and could almost see him smile. It piqued Yuta’s curiosity so intensely it made him tense for a moment before the pain of simply using any muscle ever above his hips grounded him in reality.</p><p>Jaehyun pointed over to Yuta, and Yuta saw a cautious head peek out. He nodded for politeness and watched them duck back out of sight. He started scanning for the next home.</p><p>As Jaehyun walked back to the horses, he raised his shoulder no more than an inch and twitched his eyes and ears away from a buffet of wind, hair sweeping over his temple in a disruption over his pink-bitten face.</p><p>“They said yes,” said Jaehyun once he was within speaking distance, and despite the good fortune of it, Yuta felt his dread redouble as he handed back the blankets and shirt so he could at least get down. Jaehyun wrapped one blanket around his head for his ears, Yuta would imagine, even if it was only for a short time.</p><p>Yuta tried to imagine Jaehyun wasn’t watching, or maybe even concerned, as he lifted himself out of the saddle. It occurred to him then. “You didn’t tell them that I was injured,” he asserted, half questioning and turning to Jaehyun.</p><p>For a moment, Jaehyun’s expression—just his eyes and the soft swell beneath them—was hard. The next moment, that hint was gone. “No,” he said, “or else they would think I did it.”</p><p>There were layers to that idea that Yuta didn’t want to peel.</p><p>He caught up his mare’s reins and told Jaehyun about where they could tether them. The likelihood of someone wandering up and thieving them in this weather was still low enough to be a risk they could take, but, “We’ll be sleeping near that wall,” Jaehyun said.</p><p>Which meant that Yuta just had to brace himself for the people within. He dropped his hood, snagged his sandals from his things, and tried to fix his hair before hefting the saddlebags onto his right shoulder. He tucked the twist of his hair under the saddlebag belting so it wouldn’t tangle over his face as Jaehyun removed the blanket from around his ears with reluctantly slow hands. </p><p>The rest of Yuta’s energy was spent trying not to think of whether he would defile their home just stepping past the doorway. He probably smelled, he probably wasn’t very clean, and he certainly wasn’t an excellent houseguest. His ideal stay would entail being huddled in the corner like an ignored problem, which he arguably was.</p><p>Nonetheless, Jaehyun had him go through first, and Yuta just barely remembered not to wince when he bowed at the adult who opened the door. “Sorry for disturbing,” he said because their face looked reserved but had smile wrinkles at the corners of their eyes.</p><p>“There’s room in the back,” they said, which unfortunately didn’t lessen the anxiety in his hands as he dropped his sandals and pulled out of his boots. He tried to be quick to get out of the way of Jaehyun, and thus didn’t see anything of the home until he was already firmly in it.</p><p>A child stared at him from a mat on the floor, knees tucked to their chest, eyes huge with curiosity. Yuta’s lungs lurched, and he didn’t dare say hello, giving a jerky nod instead.</p><p>It was different in a home instead of a hospice or inn—he was intruding in this small, giving space with its oiled-paper center where he could see garden plants press their leaves against the proofed barrier. It was warmer, and he could smell a dinner they must have cooked. He felt sick at the mere idea of them offering anything.</p><p>There was an elder on the same side of the room, working on something hand-woven at a low table and watching Jaehyun behind Yuta, gaze unmoving. Yuta passed between them and the center wall, giving a bow and moving to the back where their shelves were. They were laden with a few pots, some ragged books, dried goods, bedding, other things necessary for living.</p><p>“Thank you for having us,” Jaehyun said, and the wind whistled through the home’s center gap, muffling the mumble returned to him.</p><p>There was a folded screen made of straw and reeds that Yuta hoped they would use, though he was sure Jaehyun’s visible weapons and wings, the two bangkungs, and Yuta’s entire visage didn’t endear this family to trust. He still hadn’t been able to shave where it was prickling at the edges of his jaw or anywhere, really, and everything to do with his hair drew attention. </p><p>Yuta dropped his things where they wouldn’t be in the way and carefully lowered himself to the wooden floor. </p><p>The home was small—not so small that Yuta felt claustrophobic, but small enough that there was no real way of avoiding being the elephant in the room. Or being a good portion of it, anyway.</p><p>Jaehyun did not look uncomfortable nodding to the child and bowing to the elder. He’d looked more uncomfortable being in Yuta’s proximity than he ever did right this moment, joining Yuta on the floor and smiling at the kid’s resolute attention on them both.</p><p>They hid their little head at the smile, black hair tufting up at the front against their knees.</p><p>“We don’t have extra bedding,” said the elder, old hands still frozen over their work.</p><p>“Thank you for thinking of us,” Jaehyun replied without hesitation. He was sitting closer to Yuta than he rarely did—enough that Yuta could feel the windchill radiating off him still along with a subtle tinge of magic. “We can manage.”</p><p>Yuta had his cloak and leather they could use, but the thought of sleeping with Jaehyun felt surreal inside this house, if not utterly inappropriate. At the same time, the thought of not sharing body heat felt insane, especially with Jaehyun’s absence of layers.</p><p>They had no other options than asking for shelter here, but the likelihood of Yuta sleeping felt like a hysterical wager.</p><p>He backed himself up against the edge of the shelves and let them dig a hard vertical line into his sore back, uncomfortable but a support nonetheless for his spine. The silence was harsh and guarded.</p><p>“Please ignore our intrusion,” Jaehyun continued, seated peacefully, somehow emitting a trustworthiness along with the chill Yuta could see he was keeping from shivering out. There were tension lines in the backs of his splotchy hands even as his fingers looked loose. “My companion is quiet but not unfriendly.”</p><p>That came as a shock.</p><p>“Are you a ghost?” the child piped up, head back up from their knees, and Yuta tried not to feel like someone just stole a whole organ out from his gut. In a different world, it wouldn’t be terrifying if he teased and said yes, but here, with this face and the way he was holding himself, it would.</p><p>Instead, Yuta gathered the words he would say if he were the one trying to be diplomatic and not just Jaehyun. “No,” he said. “The war took away my color.”</p><p>It both was and wasn’t true. It was genes from his dad’s side, and they started kicking in around fourteen—before he’d even gotten a proper handle on his own emerging pubescence. When the white started coming in, his hair had been oily and wrong, though he’d still had a fairly substantial amount of black at nineteen. Whatever wisps of facial hair he’d been able to grow at that age were still dark. It had taken him some time to see himself in a mirror after that, but he’d known for a while that the rest of him had gone white no less than a few months into hell. He didn’t have to look in a mirror to see that his body hair was stripped of color.</p><p>His sister hadn’t gotten it half as bad, a badger by nickname instead of ghost.</p><p>Though Yuta avoided the gazes of the adults, he saw the adult give a small kind of bow, a sort of apology for being cold, or making him uncomfortable—whatever it was. No one talked about the war if they could help it, but he could sometimes invoke a certain form of respect and avoidance through its mention.</p><p>It was at the cost of his emotional sanity, but it earned him peace.</p><p>“We’ll go about our evening,” the adult announced, and Jaehyun inclined his head appreciatively.</p>
<hr/><p>Yuta only stopped feeling like he was drowning when they finally, after laying out the bedding they gathered from the shelves, unfolded the dividing screen, sectioning the home into a tightly-lipped and boxy C.</p><p>Immediately, Jaehyun’s hands gave a little spasm before he broke form, raking his hair back then pressing his hands under his arms. His expression melted into something blanker and more uncomfortable, if not pained at the heat he was probably getting to his fingers. It was such a blatant shedding of composure that Yuta felt a tinge of amusement.</p><p>It was utterly silent on the other side of the screen aside from movements from bodies over wool and a whisper from the child that Yuta failed to catch.</p><p>Jaehyun looked at him, tilting his head in his direction, and for once directly communicated with his eyes: just pure, abject misery.</p><p>Yuta almost snorted. He <em> almost </em>laughed. He’d never seen Jaehyun actually animate his face like this, but they couldn’t speak. It made sense. It was just unexpected given his track record of reservation and hesitation.</p><p>With fingers undoubtably warmer than Jaehyun’s, Yuta shed his two outer layers and tried to be careful as he lowered himself down and aligned his spine with the ground. He ached all over, colder than he preferred, sore enough that it would kill him later to wake up, and sorely missing the privacy of this ritual.</p><p>He held up his finger. <em> One. </em></p><p>Jaehyun understood, though was careful with the execution. It was different this time—Yuta couldn’t deny that. Jaehyun fit himself properly against him, not a single blanket between them for what proximity they could have to skin-to-skin warmth. He settled his head between Yuta’s shoulder and the edge of his chest then crossed his leg over Yuta’s right, cold. He dragged Yuta’s cloak over them both as Yuta found a place for his right arm, hugging across Jaehyun’s shoulders while his forearm dragged against the wrists and tendons of Jaehyun’s wings. Jaehyun nudged his hand up against his sheath again where it had been that first night, thumb pressed up against the hilt, and Yuta felt his exhale push across his chest.</p><p>Jaehyun apologized for this situation of all things—a breath of a “sorry” as Yuta worried over heart palpitations and just how much Jaehyun would be able to hear every thud of his pulse. Yuta released the breath he’d been holding and traced his eyes against the straw ceiling.</p><p>Carefully, and with only trace amounts of pain, Yuta adjusted and settled, feeling the more awkward agony of having Jaehyun snug like this, cold but warming.</p><p>Jaehyun let his wings fall as Yuta heard the child whisper on the other side, “Are we cursed now?”</p><p>Yuta closed his eyes and began to count his breaths on the way to whatever sleep he might manage.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="big"><span class="u">Trivia:</span></span><br/><b>Birch!</b> Birch is a hardwood that is fine-grained, light, strong, and pale. The <em>betula platyphylla</em> is a birch species native to East Asia, and is recognized as suitable and common for weapon handles. For a dagger, it’s more than appropriate.</p><p><b>Shagreen!</b> This is a European word derived from the French “chagrin,” meaning “rough skin” and leading to its meaning of distress/embarrassment. It’s rawhide—rough, untanned skin—used (in this case) to mitigate any slippage someone might get from a wood and bone handle. The implication here is that the bone inlays aren’t even visible until the shagreen is replaced (which it will have to be from time to time!).</p><p><b>Gripping with your knees!</b> Don’t do it! You stay on horses through balance and moving with the horse rather than bracing against it. Gripping with your knees will lead to sore legs and make the horse work harder. All in all, if it’s too windy to ride, it’s probably too windy for the horses, whose hearing and sight are significantly worse in windy weather. This leads to nervousness and tension, though these horses are troopers—as Yuta kind of indicated, they might have some lucky experience with stressful conditions. Jaehyun’s similar to the horses as far as his senses go and a little worse off because of his uhhhh general pseudo-aerodynamic anatomy. I say pseudo because he is not, in fact, a complete bird, and his wings and body do not fit together the same way as they do for actual birds.</p><p> <b>Hanoks!</b> I <em>loosely</em> based the home on the Korean hanok—specifically with a byeotjib (rice straw) roof. I say loosely because I was inspired by the shape, traditional materials, and building theory but ultimately fit it to my needs with the garden underbelly and oiled-paper core. There are some details I left out because Yuta’s not an A/E/C expert, but this one is built for insulation, cooling, and wind-protection for its exposed state.</p><p><b>Bunds!</b> These are for un-terraced paddy fields (in this case both rice and taro), separating one plot from the next. The one Jae’s walking on is wider for the purpose of a pathway, but traditionally these earthen mounds should be no bigger than 50cm x 30cm. These need to be properly compacted and sealed to avoid seepage. Forgive me for not explaining paddy fields and irrigation in general—that would be a lot and hopefully you guys have a general idea of what I’m talking about!</p><p>There are a handful of things I’m ignoring/glossing over that I drew on various Eastern cultures for—including veteran regard, polite greetings, and facial hair. You’re welcome to ask about these, but I only have so much room in the author’s notes ;; ♡ </p><p>Thank you so much for all your love and support ;; please share your thoughts if you're willing!! I'll see if I can get to comments this week ♡ </p><p>
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<a name="section0015"><h2>15. You Shouldn't Hold Things Gently</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Alright =] two-week break starts now, which means I will update on the 29th (as in I'm skipping two updates, which is technically 3 weeks)! I need to get some headway on certain WIPs and publish a March fic, so you'll be seeing me (just not with Wist until then)!</p><p>Thank you in advance for your patience and support ;; As always, I hope to make each update worth the wait ♡</p><p>CW: injury, pain<br/>TW: hyperventilation + panic attack</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The husband’s lips were often split right down the crease, and when he wasn’t presiding over certain concerns and people, he would lick out just barely and draw the tip of his tongue over the sore spot. He did it when he was thinking, wanted something, was angry, and whenever he laughed. </p><p>He did it when he brought Yoonoh out past the walls for the first time, when Yoonoh was still limping with a sour, numb stiffness. The dagger was strapped to the outside of the husband’s thin coat as Yoonoh caught the increasing eyes of the outer court in burnished brown.</p><p>He couldn’t ask. The blade was just there, and he could feel it. He could tell it once was his, but all he could glean was that it was following him from person to person like a ghost to his haunted body.</p><p>Other than the dagger, for one moment, and the lick of turned-up lips, Yoonoh spare glanced at his surroundings and the way every tone and shape became earthier the farther they walked and the harder his sore hip pulled across his body. People were staring, and they increased in number—greater than he’d ever seen in one place. He’d never been on the walls to look below.</p><p>The clamor of so many people living was a lot to withstand, his hearing dulling to adjust but his head filling with noise, his sight crowded, his beaten-in posture sinking into itself the closer people neared. </p><p>He became accustomed to their shoes—tight-weave, tan—and the stone pavement—grey with occasional pink where it was clean in forced places, smooth with overuse but not cracked.</p><p>
  <em> Why are we here? </em>
</p><p>Yoonoh had learned to listen rather than ask questions, but his attention was so swarmed that he was gleaning little, if anything.</p><p>He noticed the flow of feet begin to bottleneck, giving the husband a wide berth but surging closer to himself. He was sure there had to be something about the husband that made him different—signified separation—because he was alone in this treatment of the crowd, measured by the distance between feet.</p><p>If they knew him, it wasn’t because he spoke to them. The man seemed content to part crowds and stroll. Or perhaps parade his injured trophy, who knew nothing of markets or just how fascinating he was to common people and didn’t know how to rebuff their interest with his posture and countenance.</p><p>When they began to skim their fingers up against his feathers like breezes to wind chimes, he didn’t know what was happening at first. He’d never been touched innocently, and he’d only learned to tolerate that in quiet repulsion.</p><p>After it clicked and the sensation grew to a crawling, itching agitation that made him want to pull his own feathers out, he recoiled from their touch, falling out from behind the husband as his plumage articulated. He met dozens upon dozens of eyes for a wild moment. Then it happened.</p><p>The lurch.</p><p>It was central and violent, like a leash being wrenched.</p><p>All at once, his vision went sideways, spinning. He felt heat climb into his face and his knees go weak, heart thudding so suddenly and loudly that it scared and choked him. Pain seared in his chest, he staggered, then he felt his hair get yanked by the scruff and the husband’s hot breath against his cheek.</p><p>Yoonoh felt like his hip was bleeding all over again as the man’s voice banged in his ear, “Keep walking.”</p><p>The husband tossed him forward, and as Yoonoh tried not to stumble into human bodies, he heard the dagger slide back home an inch into its sheath with a <em> snick.  </em></p><p>The tightness in his chest vanished, and his vision swam into focus. Sore, however, his heart continued to pound in his ears as he regained his feet and tried not to look at the weapon and what it had done to him—for one terrifying moment—without a single flourish or jab to his skin.</p><p>~*~</p><p>It was only used when he didn’t do what they wanted, and the severity of the effects varied.</p><p>He got it into his head that it was fun for them to watch him be proud and defiant, then stumble, flushed, and come close to his knees from the tight pain in his chest and a spinning equilibrium.</p><p>Given repetition, he became accustomed to the way it worked. Though it had little to do with sheathing and unsheathing, he had a conditioned reaction to seeing it handled, and his attention began to narrow into body language again.</p><p>Privacy wasn’t a privilege they afforded him, and therefore he wasn’t able to root his sanity that way, but he found ways to divide action by intention—his submission seemed to unnerve them as much as they delighted in quashing his disobedience. It was a chaotic combination.</p><p>He rose from it.</p><p>For a time, as he never had his feet for very long.</p>
<hr/><p> </p><p>Yuta wasn’t sure he ever truly fell asleep. He always felt either distantly or acutely conscious of Jaehyun, the wind, the breathing of the family behind the screen, and the slow warmth that was trying its best to lull his exhaustion into unconsciousness and failing.</p><p>There had been more than a handful of times in his life where he’d experienced this level of extended fatigue, if not worse. He was no stranger to it, but it didn’t make it any better.</p><p>It was gratifying, though, to hear Jaehyun lapse in and out of consciousness depending on the length and depth of his breathing and how heavily he lay on Yuta’s chest. It was late, dark, and lonely. Yuta could admit to that.</p><p>But Jaehyun never slipped under for very long either. He moved once—just barely—upon gaining a more significant consciousness. He tensed, muscles coiling, and pressed closer to Yuta, his thumb and closest knuckle squeezing in against his ribs. And then he relaxed. If Yuta listened very closely against the dulling wind, he could almost hear Jaehyun blink against his shirt, and he could almost imagine that groggy confusion that always seemed to claim him.</p><p>Just once, he curled his fingers up against Jaehyun’s shoulder, cloth bunching, then smoothed them out. He heard a heavier exhale in response, but that was it, and that was all Yuta felt comfortable doing for one night.</p><p>Instead, he ignored the increasing discomfort of his lower spine and waited until the weather died for long enough to excuse his desire to leave. He did not want to have to deal with this family again, their irrelevant scrutiny and subconscious pressure. It wasn’t that he wasn’t grateful, but that the debt of hospitality combined with how completely out of sorts he was made good humor extremely difficult. </p><p>Yuta was capable of vibrancy despite everything, but he had his limits.</p><p>When the atmosphere outside remained silent for longer than Yuta could track, he lifted his arm from around Jaehyun’s shoulders, scudding across the wrists of his wings again, and waited for him to rouse from the motion as he lowered his hand to the cold floor.</p><p>Jaehyun breathed in through his nose, long and slow, then held his air. Yuta counted five seconds before Jaehyun tensed his arms and slowly brought his knee to the floor between Yuta’s legs and lifted himself—gently, carefully, with far more consciousness and grace than Yuta had seen from him in a long while coming off of sleep.</p><p>But he did see the way Jaehyun tossed his head a bit, hair falling in slips, and heard the breath he let out, measured and quiet. The coat and leather were louder as they started to slide off Jaehyun’s body, and Jaehyun jerked to catch them, <em> that </em> motion clumsy.</p><p>Yuta’s body was warm across every inch Jaehyun had left him, and for a moment, his psyche refused to move a muscle. He held onto the memory, exhausted and oddly bereft, then finally pushed himself onto his right elbow as Jaehyun eased back onto his heels.</p><p>One of the bodies behind the screen had a rattle in their breath, and it was easy to hide most small noises in the flow. Yuta hadn’t scoped out both sides of the floor, so when they got up to take their leave, every tread was tested, shifted, placed. He couldn’t know how soundly they slept, so he commanded his aching body.</p><p>The cold air might wake them, but it didn’t matter if they were already out the door, boots on, the chill shocking their dehydrated pores. The winds had died, and the unlatched entrance would stay closed by its own weight.</p><p>The horses were huddled down near the underside of the house, tucked close for warmth in a parallel animalism. As Yuta tugged on his layers and urged them to stand, Jaehyun diverted after slinging the saddlebags on their backs, pulling off his bracers and rolling up his sleeves. He stuck his hands in the ripe taro mud that had drained significantly during the night, nose wrinkling for frigidity or distaste, and Yuta traced the expression, its tiny bunches like kitten whiskers. Despite how dark it still was, cloudy and verging on humid now, the cover had thinned enough to lend light and let him study Jaehyun as he had become accustomed.</p><p>Yuta listened to the scrape of soil and the rustle of dying taro stems tapping up against Jaehyun’s skull as he dragged his hands around the base, shoved deeper, and lifted as his boot tips teased the mud. Horse breath huffed near Yuta’s neck and he petted idly at his mare’s bony head while she shivered herself to life.</p><p>“You got talons of steel, too?” Yuta muttered idly, too tired to question if this neutral praise was crude, and for once his own voice sounded rusty.</p><p>Jaehyun took a moment, but he snorted as he pulled the taro cluster free, leaves knocking up against his upper wing as it tried to pass his shoulder. </p><p>He tapped the hunk against the bund with the stems as a whip, straightening to a stooping stand. “The next fire we get, we can boil these,” he said instead of answering, voice gritty but not as bad—it had had less time to crust over; they had stolen an hour or so of sleep at maximum. </p><p>The idea of having anything souplike was too enticing for Yuta’s imagination to productively chase. He hummed a short beat instead and tugged the horses along the pathway back to the road.</p><p>Jaehyun hadn’t seemed offended, but in retrospect Yuta still felt like he’d stuck his foot in his mouth and bit down on leather. He worried his bottom lip, pulling at the dead skin while Jaehyun was still behind him as they walked a few paces out from the home.</p><p>He dreaded getting back on his horse. He could feel his right hip clicking amidst the entire, mulish pain running up and down his body, muscles re-twitching after every movement. He knew how to bear it—and could certainly try to ignore it—but if he could be a dead body draped across his mare’s saddle and be comfortable like that without bruising his ribs or having all his blood drain to his feet and head, that would be the riding posture he would choose.</p><p>Instead, he took a moment to hesitate, to breathe himself through it, to internally wince through his body so he could brace against them when he mounted. If only for his own dignity. He came close to closing his eyes and thunking his forehead against the saddle as Jaehyun knotted the wilted taro stems to his own saddle. Instead, Yuta placed his hands up and felt himself blanch at the grip of pain that made his neck pinch and the space between his shoulder blades snarl.</p><p>He was blind for a moment of fear, and he hefted himself even though he couldn’t, and his elbow and wrist gave out just like that, the hard leather of the saddle knocking up against his ribs, and his heels landing hard on the packed earth of the main road. It staggered him, nails scraping against his mare’s hide on accident, and he heaved in a startled breath as the slate skies tilted.</p><p>Jaehyun steadied him, because there were probably only so many things he could pretend to ignore. Yuta knew that, but it made his gut burn, acidic, at the firm grasp Jaehyun had on his upper right arm.</p><p>Then shock peeled back from the pain, and it hit him through the throat, rolling through his body with greater efficiency than a storm. He felt an associative panic take hold—the moment it caught the end of his unraveling spools as his shoulder bubbled up in a hissing scorn and his leg answered—and he could taste magic-scorched wood, the crackling oil-treated beams, vision tinted by the odd colors fire turned when it nursed on chemicals, bodies.</p><p>Yuta barely felt himself get backed up against the side of his horse and Jaehyun cupping both hands over Yuta’s nose and mouth. “Easy,” Jaehyun told him as Yuta wrangled with too much coming too fast and his lungs flinching his accelerating breath.</p><p>He found his own fingers around Jaehyun’s wrist but didn’t pull him away, leaning into his hands to cage in his own hyperventilation, vision tunneling in spinning sweeps as the dark pounded echoes.</p><p>He thought he felt Jaehyun’s forehead pressed to his. His voice was so close. “I remember that the fields are in just a few more miles, and then it's woods again, and the northern river splits off for a lake. We’ll stop there and pick a spot where there aren’t any bandits, and we can wait for you to recover. Or we can move, since you don’t seem to like being still. I’m not on a tight schedule. We could hit Geran and not even touch the court for a time.”</p><p>When Yuta saw Jaehyun’s eyes, very dark in a morning so early it wasn’t even close to day, their lines were firm—not wide or pinched. Just steady. They were not forehead to forehead, but Jaehyun was near enough.</p><p>Yuta drew in his next breath with control and purpose, though it shuddered and relapsed, then steadied, then shuddered and relapsed again. It took seconds as his body still rang with pain, but he rooted himself back into the familiar and Jaehyun’s warming skin under his grip.</p><p>So close to his mouth and nose, Jaehyun’s hands smelled of sodden soil, wet from the taro he’d leveraged up, and they were likely smeared with dirt.</p><p>He pulled on Jaehyun’s wrist and Jaehyun dropped his hands willingly.</p><p>Yuta didn’t want to look at him, but he was so light-headed that if he took a step he’d tilt.</p><p>His mind was numbing.</p><p>Without asking or needing to be asked, Jaehyun kept a hand on him as Yuta placed only his right grip on his horse’s saddle. Jaehyun hefted, Yuta pulled, and Jaehyun re-steadied him with a steady pressure on his hip as Yuta sank into a sit and sucked measured breaths through his mouth. He looked at the sky, feet jammed securely in his stirrups, instead of Jaehyun, and ignored the swift mount he took in his periphery.</p><p>They should eat and drink. They should get moving. Yuta shouldn’t have had another panic attack in front of Jaehyun.</p><p>Yuta couldn’t say he shouldn’t have stolen the pin that was still snug under his belt, which was a remarkable indecision given he was falling apart.</p><p>He tapped his horse forward as aches ran up his thighs, and the clouds wouldn’t part for even a single batch of stars.</p><p><br/>
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<hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>At twelve, he heard the unusual, old Ienkran word for “war”—and it was new, to him, who wasn’t allowed near very many books for very long. What little, slow reading he could do was from memorizing verbals in court, then slipping away the book from which they’d read and smuggling it into the nooks and crannies he’d found over the years as he outgrew old ones. </p><p>He could see patterns easily, but reading without a tutor was like calligraphy without a brush. It took him a year to learn what “war” meant, though the dots he connected through context were serendipitous. He hadn’t since heard the actual word. He simply remembered it, one thing in a long catalogue of sounds and shapes his mind liked to puzzle out.</p><p>When it cropped up again, he was seventeen, and it dotted conversations like stars so faded one almost couldn’t see them, almost couldn’t hear them.</p><p>Plain servants, speaking of brothers meshing with the word; the called courts ringing about it in deliberate debates as tea was poured and Yoonoh ignored the capewings from other masters; from the messenger’s lips when she knuckled him in his chest wing muscles and left him gasping as she said, “You wouldn’t last a second in a real battle.” And “battle,” he’d figured out, was just a minor word for the other, larger one—almost a diminutive, a cutting.</p><p>The wife, leaning into her husband in early summer while Yoonoh’s ugly molted wings were draped and tucked with heavy bolted cloth that caught the wind wrong and pulled tension lines through his neck, the muscles under his arms, his chest—she often seemed to consider herself alone even with Yoonoh there, though sometimes she would speak private words as her eyes skated him from toe to eyes where he tried to escape her gaze. Her lips stuck together for a moment as she parted them, sticky as her voice in the humid heat. “The skimmers sent message that the next batch cannot be used for war.”</p><p>War.</p><p>“Cannot?” repeated the husband, the garden sleepily alive around them in midday while Yoonoh hugged his shoulder to the bamboo patch. Across the way was the husband’s attendant, just human and sweating slowly down her wide forehead. He watched a bead collect and drop, not needing to read lips to hear the court masters. “Medei must have something to say about that. Who told them?”</p><p>The wife stretched out her leg along the jute mat they both occupied across the dirt and grass as the pond eddied with fish. It gave off a mild coolness, and they sat in the crawling shade of the garden’s central tree.</p><p>Her slipper came loose from her heel, but she did not look Yoonoh’s way, so he returned his eyes to the sweating attendant.</p><p>“Medei Taknaen has reason to believe it leaked from central,” she said, voice drooling honey even though Yoonoh knew she was speaking from something less than sugared. “They have records missing from the capitol.”</p><p>Yoonoh looked just in time to see the husband's face draw in amusement and annoyance. “If they think that so significant, they should make the branches more secure—”</p><p>“She’s <em> aware,” </em> she said, then finally looked Yoonoh’s way and inhaled delicately through her nose. He stepped out of his snatched shade. “Think about where the crumbs fall.”</p><p>When Yoonoh knelt to correct her shoe, he was braced for the moment she leaned forward and drew her hand through his hair. He didn’t register it or the painful scrape of her nails against his nape that would leave red streaks, only fixing her shoe and removing his hands with whatever degree of care she wouldn’t interpret as cold from him. She expected maturity from him unlike when she had once permitted him to cower.</p><p>“Yoonoh,” she said sweetly, “you look awful with too much sun. Get a pitcher of drink for me, will you?”</p><p>For a moment, she nudged the backs of her knuckles against the silk of one sore wing. He did not meet the eyes of the husband, and did not look at the dagger pressed to the wife’s thin clothes.</p><p>He stood and left, “war” pinging around in his head. The messenger would go to war, if Ienkra were coming to that.</p><p>Yoonoh likely would not.</p>
<hr/><p>But he was still Avia, and the trails of “war” led one path to him, narrow and late as it was. He was just barely eighteen by the new year, since he was never given a day upon which he’d been born. It woke him by the ankle, dragged too by the root of one wing, and he’d been roughly handled before but not so suddenly from sleep.</p><p>He cried out in the dark, scrambling for purchase, and got struck across the face like he was so rarely these past few years. Bruises had always been littered elsewhere, but the wife tended to bemoan his face, which meant he hated it, and sought to goad blows there. But that didn’t mean it didn’t shock him to hit the floor as a rebound, to bite his cheek and taste blood, to be rattled out of drowsiness by a pain so unusual regardless of how accustomed he was to the general feeling.</p><p>The shock cleared in action as instincts claimed his body and he dug his nails into the forearm that led to the hand that gripped his wing. He heard a mouth swear, and then a second blow to his face that made the darkness rattle like a dry cascade of rock. He didn’t bite his inner cheek this time, but his head spun, and he tried to kick as he was lifted. There were five hands, then six as someone yanked on his forelock and pulled back. Someone knelt on his calf and another twisted his arms back as he daren’t call more attention to his wings, the one throbbing in weak warning.</p><p>A light flared to life, and he came to terms with the firelit face of a stablehand he’d only seen and not met as they held up the open lantern. As three hands drove his knees to the stone flagstones with a crack. It choked a sound out of him, throat stretched out by the hand that still held his throbbing face back.</p><p>The kick to his abdomen was brutal, and his sight went pale despite there not being a lick of white around him to generate it. Whatever cry he tried to sound was throttled by the grip on his hair, and he just tried to breathe and not let his vision spin too quickly.</p><p>Instead, his mind spun. He was still surprised and not yet burning even as he coughed and reconciled his discomfort and blunt pains. From the seconds they spared him to collect himself, he tried to count heartbeats: four, excluding his own.</p><p>“How does it feel to be the master’s pet?” sneered the stablehand, though their words were stiff and clipped. “Your own bedroom, eating fine foods—”</p><p><em> Pet. </em>Disgust slurried through him. If the wife ever offered him fine foods, it was from the palm of her hand, and she seemed charmed by his rejection every time. She could always force him down and had before, but seldom did. As for his private room, it wasn’t. There was a sliding door that looked like a wall and led to thick paper hallways. He often woke with someone within his space, watching him. If the servants cared to look, they’d see it was little more than a prison cell without bars for his thin mattress and zero possessions.</p><p>Now, he burned.</p><p>“It’s an honor,” he choked with vitriol, putting hatred for how much it wasn’t in every strangled note. They wouldn’t know that the hatred wasn’t aimed at them, but he wanted them to think it.</p><p>He got a boot clipping his hip—not the scarred one, but the one that was burned from the earth that had skidded runs across his pelvic bone when he’d hit the ground just yesterday, still on occasion struggling to best the messenger when she was better than him in every category and not old enough to be flagging.</p><p>Skin tender and bone feeling bruised, it hurt a lot more than the other blows had, and he jerked his arms—they got wrenched back harder.</p><p>The stablehand spat an Ienkran scorn, but there was still something off about the way they called him a soulless rat-swallower. As the stories went, Avia had given up their core humanity to merge with dead birds. The soullessness was implied to be doubled, and being that close to evil gave them magic.</p><p>Was that offness fear?</p><p>But people weren’t afraid of Avia—least of all him, who couldn’t move out from under the thumbs pinning him down, could hardly fly without it hurting and grounding him for a day, could barely fight without getting his shit kicked in.</p><p>Yoonoh thought of the fourth heart he’d heard.</p><p>“Pluck ‘im,” said the stablehand, voice wavering.</p><p>That ripped him from his thoughts just as one hand left his hair. </p><p>He thrust out his wings from their fold and felt his muscle and bone knock up against something hard. The grip on the base of his wing loosened, tacky with sweat in the way it pulled a little against the down they’d dug their fingers into. He heard the one holding his arms fall back, pulling him with them but not stable enough to maintain their hold.</p><p>The stablehand aimed a kick, but his wings were out and he swept them with a flick that gave just enough of a distance, the instinct and knowledge of how to use them always there even if it was exhausting, and the sudden wind flushed out the firelight with a wink.</p><p>And then he felt the lurch, doubled down by dread, and as his hands clapped to the ground to stop his skull from hitting stone at the sudden, overwhelming dizziness and pain.</p><p>“Ah, well,” said a winter-wet, sticky voice, and dread mulled rotten wine through him. “That didn’t work.”</p><p>The pull increased until something snapped, and he lost consciousness with less than a breath.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="big"><span class="u">Trivia:</span></span><br/><b>Taro!</b> This is not our dear Shotaro, though his presence is as nutritious as this tropical root vegetable. Along with rice and lotus, this is one of the few crops that can grow in flooded conditions, and is primarily grown for its corm. When the leaves start to turn yellow and die, they are ready for harvest, which should happen before first frost (in other words, 'tis the season! and close to being too cold). Both the corms and leaves are nutritious, but are toxic when raw. Its toxins can be reduced via cooking or steeping, but most of what I've seen recommends cooking rather than steeping. The corm is starchy and nutty, and the leaves are high(er than the corms) in protein (delightfully surprising).</p><p><b>Jute!</b> This is another standing water crop, typical to monsoon climates (hot and humid). Jute fibers retted and stripped from the stem and outer skin are woven to create soft, lustrous, versatile, and sturdy twines used for anything from bags and matting to bags and rope. Its natural and biodegradable qualities make it ideal for preventing flood erosion while still encouraging the growth of vegetation. You've seen it used for espadrilles, I'd bet too. When I called this crop versatile, I really meant it—you should look it up if you're curious. It's even got culinary uses.</p><p> <br/>Also, does this switch count as a cliffhanger? My bad hhhh we'll just have to see what happens with chapter 16 on the 29th~</p><p>
  <a href="https://twitter.com/speckledsolana">twitter</a>
  <br/>
  <a href="https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1">curiouscat</a>
  <br/>
</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0016"><h2>16. We're Shaped by Trials of Instinct</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Releasing this a day early =] I'll be back on schedule for at <em>least</em> the next update, and I have the next two chapters started. I do have some life events coming up, though, so I'll keep you guys in the know ♡ Hopefully I can be on schedule for a longer stretch again soon!</p>
<p>PLEASE CHECK THE NEW FIC TAGS<br/>CW: minor blood, nonconsensual intimacy, suffering<br/>TW: brief and minor suicidal ideation</p>
<p>Reminder: Jaehyun/Yoonoh is eighteen in this chapter (as he was at the end of 15)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The only reason Yuta saw it happen was because he was bored, having little interest in the weaver’s guild aside from what Eikichi taught him about braiding. He knew that in two years, he wouldn’t be scoping out any guilds or even the ranks, hands stained as they were with coal, calluses, and burns already at fourteen—being here, surrounded by the milling mugginess of the trade hall and waiting, was merely a sign of passive support.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eikichi’s palms were allegedly clammy, after all, plucking at the edges of his current magnum opus which had since been laid aside on the table edge as he bargained admittance with the prevailing apprentices. A creation that was, right that very second, being slipped off said table by a hand whose body Yuta could barely see for a sudden cluster of meaders passing by.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Can’t you stay still?” Iri hissed and jerked on his hair to get him back down on his heels from the balls of his feet. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He swatted at her hold, “No,” and dodged her attempt to grab his arm when she saw him start to slip away.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yuta!” she protested as he passed Eikichi’s cousin where they flirted with a fletcher. Yuta swerved before someone hauling bolts of textile knocked him with their elbow, keeping his eyes on a slip of bleached linen overlay, little more than a glance of kerria yellow embroidery and woven soutache braiding over the delicate clover weave. Yuta had studied it, not daring to touch it with his grimy hands, and he knew a corner of magnum opus when he saw it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His focus started to swallow the rapid beating of his heart as his body, slight even for fourteen, snaked through the last group of tradespeople and tossed itself into the open evening air. Logic stayed his instinct to whip around and scan the streets like some maddened thing. Instead, he skipped down the steps onto the pavement, tugged on his braid, and looked toward the first sound of shoes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The thief wasn’t far from him—just there in the edge of his vision, slipping along the building wall with their arms tucked close to their body. If he shouted, they’d run, and even if people dogpiled them, Eikichi’s work might be ruined in the tussle. Yuta didn’t know why this person chose to steal that piece out of the many ignored and unattended works at the guild booth, but he intended on getting it back before Eikichi noticed it was gone.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>At fourteen, he’d never seen anyone do anything like this before, and he’d never tried pursuing anyone either, but he knew how to leave frogs on Iri’s pillow and how to sneak sweet potatoes into the forge. That was probably more perilous than this would be.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He pretended he was doing nothing but walking, which was difficult—being inconspicuous where anyone could look out their open window and see him made him feel like every motion was a streaming banner. Walking in the same direction as the swift-footed thief, he just tried to keep them in his vision with their tousled shock of dark hair, narrow shoulders, and stitched-back sleeves. Some guilds required sleeves like that, tossed back in a long fold and sewn into place, but this person wasn’t wearing beads, so—</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They turned a corner and Yuta held his breath. He paused before following, then passed in. They were already gone around the next corner, so he picked up the speed, skipping past the hauled carts and storage barrels. He found them again, cowlicks memorized in a small flow of people (all busy, none caring for the blacksmith’s occupied son), and then after four streets of similar patterns and passing into the edges of the guild sector, Yuta started to feel the passage of time at his back.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The next corner they turned, Yuta sprinted, closing the gap to the alley. His tussles with Iri rifled through his head because this person was quite a bit bigger than him and so was she. “Oi!” he barked at the entrance, for a moment sounding older than he was but almost sliding on the worn stone for his momentum.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He saw their eyes in the lengthening shadows, startled, and they dropped Eikichi’s work before they seemed to register what a runt Yuta was—he saw that moment, too, as he became infuriated by the layered linen crumpling to the pavement. Their eyes went from afraid to something far closer to disgust, and Yuta’s brain itched to place their broad nose and long eyelashes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You’re—” a weaver apprentice, specifically the kid of one of the aunties who wove for the Change faction in the court. Eikichi’s parents supported the Peace faction . . .</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They lunged for Yuta, but there were benefits to having a sister who had wanted to enter the ranks since she was little. Though this was a real fight, and there wasn’t a rattan sword in sight, Yuta still knew how to fall back and hit in the right places. It wasn’t his first bloody nose, but it was the first time he learned just how much skin gave under knuckle, how much weight he could really throw around, and just how fast his body lost energy when he had to use all of what his scrawny fourteen-year-old body held.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It ended with a kick between their legs—which Iri had taught him was for people who didn’t deserve a real brawl—and Yuta snatching up Eikichi’s work. He ran, holding his nose so it wouldn’t drip on the cloth and holding the cloth out so it didn’t drag on the ground.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His head spun when he tripped into the guild hall, spotting Eikichi looking frazzled and close to tearing his hair out, then Iri spotting </span>
  <em>
    <span>Yuta</span>
  </em>
  <span> and letting loose a swear that would make their mama tan her hide.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Someone stole this while you weren’t looking,” Yuta gasped, voice clogged, and thrust the piece away from him just as a busy someone leaving the hall rammed into him, distracted. He staggered, and Eikichi caught his work. “Sorry if it’s dusty,” Yuta continued, earnest, and finally let his nose go, self-consciously licking the blood off his upper lip.</span>
</p><hr/>
<p><br/>
<br/>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Waking gave him every sensation he could reach all at once, but his comprehension shambled in stuttering. He saw her yellow night robe first and how it tucked under her ankles and calves, pinned by the way she sat on a floor cushion the color of flax. He noticed the light washing down from the charmed lantern, hanging from a hook in the stone ceiling. Then it was his ear and the unrefined mimicry of rain as she stroked the edge with her nail, his brain telling him pain—no, not from . . . Her fingertips were cold as she flicked them down to his jaw and dragged her nail under his contour.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh, stay there,” she suggested with her half-sick voice, and now the floor came to him, arm pinned and dead between its hard surface and his body, wings slack to open air, pain—</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He sucked in a breath, and she caught it with her thumb on his bottom lip, tilting his chin at an upward angle and forcing him to shift just enough that he felt his numb fingers prickle harshly. His gaze slid down and to the side. There he found the third heartbeat among his own, hers, theirs. They stood away from them both, the respectful distance from a court master, but they were there.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Aren’t the little changes strange? Your expression hasn’t shifted much, but you </span>
  <em>
    <span>do</span>
  </em>
  <span> look older.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Holding cell. A cage. There were crossed bars like lacerations, metal dull with negligence, behind the—</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Who was the third person? An attendant?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yoonoh.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He looked at her nose, where his vision faltered for a moment, and he found his head pounding. That sore pull behind his eye sockets and imaginary bright spots like spittle in his focus. He found the space between her brows, but his neck and upper shoulder were straining by the way she pushed his chin, and he could feel his own heartbeat in his temples, thuggish.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“There we go.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She brought her other hand down and skimmed her knuckles over his exposed cheek. The one that hadn’t been digging into the cold floor. There was a pinch in his middle back that started pinging, his limbs like—</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He flinched when she met tender flesh on his cheekbone and pressed. Her laugh, nasal and small, crashed into him only after he started burning. It was a reflex. She loved to see him—</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Cute.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He stiffened. But it went too far, reaching his legs, and that was what made him remember why he was on the floor. Why he was here. He so much as twitched the muscles in his thighs and he felt like he was bleeding around bone. It took him an entire second to realize he must have shown pain in his face, hitting him when her exhale came out heavy and pulled in thin.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Does it hurt?” she asked, far from concerned. Far from remorseful. “Answer me,” she said, this time like a sweet suggestion, but her nail dug into his lip.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His head swam, his focus wavering between the coalescing specks of pain in his skull. When he swallowed, he could hear his throat click, loud, and there were so many answers to give.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The wrong one rose to his lips, but all of them were wrong: “No.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her sound was tiny at first, bitten-off, a single note of delight. This he knew because he </span>
  <em>
    <span>knew</span>
  </em>
  <span> her the way she loved to be known, his control ripped from him to see her from the inside out.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She dropped him, letting him set his face back against the ground though everything was awkward and painful, free arm limp. He barely registered her touching his hair, scraping the backs of her nails down the arc of his skull. He did register, very clearly, when she reached his wings. She lifted herself up onto her knees, the corner of her robe skimming his bruised face, and when she reached to unlatch his shirt, he closed his eyes and took it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I wouldn’t have let them pluck you,” she crooned, knotting her fingers into the plumage between his wings. She lifted his right one forward toward her, manhandling him because she could. He could sense the dagger on the other side of her legs, hidden from view. “But I don’t know how to make you</span>
  <em>
    <span> angry, </span>
  </em>
  <span>Yoonoh. I’ve trained you too well.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He </span>
  <em>
    <span>was</span>
  </em>
  <span> angry. He’d discovered the emotion and called it his for years now—not hers.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Would you tell me how to get you there if I said I needed it?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The heartbeat of the attendant, there in the corner, became far too prominent in the forefront of Yoonoh’s brain when she slid his shirt down to his lower back. She found his rightmost preen gland with her other hand at the base of his wing, tucked up against the prominent ridge of his scapula. His bones clawed at his skin.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She had touched him there only once, when he was young, and it had been with the hard knuckle of dripping reprimand. He’d forgotten.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Panic felt like pain; his thighs and forearms throbbed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No, it would be a shame to pluck you. These feathers are new.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He found himself with his eyes open, staring through sheer cotton at the gray stone ground.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He could feel every stroke of her fingertips around each feather she zipped.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Does this feel good?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The attendant was blocked by her clothes. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Any answer would give her pleasure.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>If he couldn’t die, then he wanted to disappear. She was a personal nightmare—something he could almost trap and ignore—but being seen by other eyes in this position, on the floor with his swollen muscles and back bare, touched in ways that lodged needles in his skin, made it inescapable. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He couldn’t hide.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What if I pull?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She tugged on a greater secondary covert then held it, inching those fingers down to pinch at his down along with the base, and he was sure that as she swept her robe aside and grazed her fingertips over his fresh bruises, she was watching for a wince.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His fingers dug into his abdomen where they were trapped under his body, but he did not wince.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When she yanked—so hard and wrong he felt blood prick his empty pores—every bit of him seized, and that motion alone through bruises and ruined muscle, wrenched his breath from him. His mind scrambled at the edges of his senses, then went up in smoke as pangs of hurt lurched through him. He ground the edge of his forehead into the stone and strangled back a whine.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her mouth made a wet noise, but he did not look as ruined black fluff stuck to her robe, trying to get his muscles to relax but finding it all worse than before. Shaking, he fought for breath, fingers flinching where his forearms rendered him immobile, lungs aching and shuddering.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Don’t you worry, pet,” she said through his pain-drowned fog. Her breathing was somewhat labored, heavy like a fondling touch. “I won't take more flight feathers. You look hideous without them.” The edge of that same feather brushed against his tightened eyelids, down across his lips. “I’ll keep this one though.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was impossible to keep his sources from welling, preparing to protect and nothing more even though it made him shake with agony, spent muscles boiling and his head ringing.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The bare edges of his attention heard her speak away from him, but it was muffled by her pressing the wet quill to his swollen cheek.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Several times in his life, he’d experienced the overwhelming urge to </span>
  <em>
    <span>do</span>
  </em>
  <span> something, anything—scramble away and tuck himself into a corner, lash out and break another bone like he had at ten and like the messenger always did to him—but never once had it earned him more control or even respite. Protesting garnered amusement, a sort of relish that was disorienting and violating though there was close to nowhere that she and her husband and their fucking messenger hadn’t touched.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She pressed that mouth-wetted quill to his skin and he froze over because he didn’t know how to exist in a way that was bearable. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hold his wings back for me,” she said, unsheathing the dagger.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When she invoked the name they’d given him and dug her elbow into his thigh, he screamed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Thrashed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Broke, sobbed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Screamed again and begged.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And somewhere in there the world had been a sunset he remembered. Just barely, in the dredges of a five-year-old life. He remembered holding someone’s hand, a different name, a charm he could almost touch, and mountains.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The pain that followed was incomparable, and the smell that overtook him was that of something alive going up in smoke.</span>
</p><hr/>
<p>
  <span>He woke up in his bedroom, unable to move, and no one came and went for three entire days except for one of the husband’s women. She left him steeped water and food—rice, vegetables, fruit—which he did not touch because not only was it too painful to move, he wanted to die. It wasn’t an option, because his life wasn’t his own, and she forced a cup to his lips every time she came with a new tray.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>On the fourth, the messenger visited, hair shorn, the dagger strapped to her thigh. “You’re just going to lie there and give them everything, huh?” she said, the barbs around her waist kissing the scars in her skin.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She said that like they asked before taking. Did he have any other choice? </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>If he described his life, word for word in objective picture, she would call him a brat, a grouse, she would level him with words that confirmed he was pathetic. As if being capable and hale would slough him out of this hell.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He said nothing, in part because the exertion and pain of lifting himself onto his elbows, then his palms, and seeing his migraine skitter across his vision was so severe he broke out in a sweat. Panting would earn him derision, though clenching his jaw to keep his air restrained to his nose was painful, too.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When he sat back on his heels, he swallowed down a gasp, reeling in the ache before it reached his tear ducts.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Get used to it,” she said where she assessed him with visible distaste.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ll be back in the pavilion tomorrow,” he said with effort, forcing himself to meet her muddy eyes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She snorted, and he hated her. “Fine by me.”</span>
</p><hr/>
<p>
  <span>When the messenger said “get used to it,” she had evidently meant the torture in the court’s holding cells—for that simply was what it was. They always gave him time to recover physically, only forcing him down once a month or less, but it was always the wife touching him. The attendant changed often, the husband joining every two to three times. The man tended to laugh.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The court began to fill with people who had seen Yoonoh, changing from plain faces to witnesses, and he couldn’t get a handle on his emotions. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was like walking through a building of his own ghosts, shaking ropes off his ankles and wrists, making sense of the sensation of turning anywhere and feeling someone’s eyes on him. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The month he truly broke and wept on the floor of the cage, bleeding out from everywhere less than physical, she had escalated the pain to excruciating levels just to get him to unleash something. They wanted magic from him—that much he realized—which rose when he had hope to save himself. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Instead, that time, everything inside himself had caved. He’d lost himself somewhere, dark and locked, floating under miles upon miles of earth, and his sources went cold.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He woke from the emptiness days later, body hollow and aching.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When he rose, he couldn’t recognize his hands, the tendons sharp and grey and thin. Legs folded, he studied himself for the first time in years and found that every inch of him hurt. Every inhale pushed at skin that didn’t want to exist.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Quietly, in the dark, he counted his birthdays for every new year—nineteen—then counted which ones he remembered being glad to be alive—none.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But this wasn’t his body, anymore. These weren’t his hands. She’d touched every fingertip, every groove in his palms; the messenger had forced every callus, every blade-bearing muscle he had; and the husband had seen to the tiny scars around his fingers and knuckles he barely recalled receiving.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The messenger had asked if he was really going to give them everything. Wouldn’t it be rich if they took his life, too? Ground him into the stone and dirt until he died like that, soul in their stained grip.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yoonoh picked himself up from his bed and rolled the mat up, heartbeat ticking loudly for the energy it depleted. He then raised himself up against the far wall. He counted the steps it took for him to walk the perimeter, one heel to other toe, testing how quiet every movement could be.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>For a time, he had thirteen by fifteen steps all to himself, dusty with moonlight that wetted its way through the paper walls. He drank the water and ate the food that had been left for him but didn’t taste it. He studied his toes and the marbled cold of his veins. His arms, his knees, his bruises, the edges of his face, and unwashed hair.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And then he took his wings apart, feathers lacking in luster for how little he touched them. He spread them slowly, stretched them back, to the side, out as far as he could reach—all slowly enough that it didn’t wrestle a single wince out of him. His muscles shook for their stiffness, then his skin lit up when he started to preen.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He took his time. He was alone, and he was empty, so he took his time.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He counted his feathers but didn’t start over when he lost count, filling his mind with arbitrary numbers and the feeling of oil on his fingertips from his shoulder blades. Every feather firmly rooted, every one warm with down and semiplumes down at their base.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yoonoh had never loved his wings, and still didn’t now, but with every zip and twitch to get them back in place, he felt a little more like they were his.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It started like that. At nineteen, he figured out he could retouch the things she’d touched. From that time forward, in the small silent moments he had, he counted himself, studied and let his mind wander over his own body—no more loving, but more familiar.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But that day when the sun rose, he passed through the halls and patio walkways to the pavilion, ignoring any service he passed who had, over the past year, tread around him differently. He could hear their hearts hike or see their motion disrupt and become busier, but he refused to look them in the face to recognize them. With recognition came phantoms.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The pavilion was off-center to the entire inner court, and the court masters’ quarters were to the precise east to its wooden structure, the sun lighting up any training he did with the messenger for their viewing pleasure.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He stood against one of the beams, leaning and listening—searching for the low conversation of the masters or the tread of the messenger.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The latter came first, and she said upon stepping up against its slatted floor, “You’re supposed to be a dead loss on the ground of your bedroom.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Yoonoh couldn’t contrive a response to that except that he wasn’t. He’d found something—the frayed edge of a purpose—and he was still rolling its threads between his fingers, trying to figure out what it was.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She scoffed when he didn’t so much as turn toward her. “Since you’ve shown up both unexpectedly and unwanted,” she began, though her barbs didn’t sting, “you’ll have to be unarmed today.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Last time they’d fought, he’d nicked her across the bicep, then blocked every furious advance she’d made to make him pay for it. Now would be her opportunity to cut him back, and he was weak, so he was sure she’d manage.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I thought,” he said, voice odd to his own ears, “you’d be off to war by now.” He still wouldn’t turn toward her, watching the bushes along the stone path wiggle with thrushes. The colors of early day were bright, almost pastel, the water from the oversized pond bubbling, willow soughing, and underneath all of that the creak of floorboards as the court household moved.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ve been,” the messenger said with a lick of stiffness in her voice. Yoonoh heard every inch of her sword being unsheathed with its gradual curve and sharp resonance. A late spring wind caught through the beams and rafters, cold and silking its way through his tended feathers.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Didn’t trust you enough to find use for you?” he said, the words deciding themselves upon his tongue as he loosed them.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He could hear the shift of her sandaled foot on the wood, and he shied away from her, catching her sword’s tip in his periphery. “I’m a messenger,” she said, voice tight and low. “They trust me more than anyone.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It wasn’t too much of a gamble if he were wrong—she would correct him in one way or another—but if he was right . . . “If you could read,” he said, words hitting the air like a snake rattle. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She snatched her next inhale so suddenly he heard it catch, and he slipped out of range just as she made a violent sweep with her sword, arm and body extended like the lash of a rigid whip. Her eyes, when he met them, were expressing something he’d never seen before, though it resulted in aggression that acted like rage.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her mouth thin as she moved like she intended on killing him, she did not reply, and he spent all his energy keeping his feet. She never fought him kindly, and so this was nothing new, if not swinging with greater weight. However he’d affected her, he found himself unmoved and unalarmed. He’d learned her wrath for six years, patterns unoriginal when furious. Despite his exhaustion, he knew how to escape her and could do so for a time.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He tucked his wings and stayed out of the way of her sword and wingspan, circling the pavilion floor. Their molting seasons countered each other, so he knew how not to rely on his wings for speed, but his headache began to build and the tendons in his ankles tweaked painfully. Though it had been less than a couple minutes, when he reached the small stairs, he stepped down.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He backed away from her as she heaved in breath so indelicate he could hear a whistle in her lungs. She did not pursue him, nose flaring in her sculpted face. “You bleeding piece of worthless shit,” she spat as his head pounded.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His own breath steadying, though the edges of his vision were starting to blur, he spread his hands. “I’m not bleeding.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When she slung out her knife from the back of her belt, he moved just in time, tripping to avoid its edge, and watched it clatter against the stones hugging the slow-moving creek. The plunk of water. Her bruised eyes. Her surging outrage.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Through his tired vision, he found every line and wrinkle in her sun-worn face, traced her lawn of hair, and met her shivering pupils. She raised a breath into her lungs, expression searching for words with which to hurt him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He walked away.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="big"><span class="u">Trivia:</span></span><br/><b>Mead!</b> Chemical analyses of early Neolithic pottery jars have proven the presence of mixed fermented beverages. These were made from rice, honey, and fruit (hawthorn fruit and/or grape) and were being produced as early as 7000BC in China. Mead is alcohol fermented from honey.</p>
<p><b>Golden Eagles!</b> This is the messenger’s . . . “breed,” so to speak. They molt in late autumn, whereas carrion crows molt in the summer (early summer for Jaehyun). There are two subspecies I could reasonably pick from for her—the berkut or the Japanese Golden Eagle—but they’re both so similar that I can’t be bothered. The latter is the smallest subspecies of golden eagle, and the former is the second darkest subspecies. Overall, it is a popular bird in falconry and has historically been revered by some cultures.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>We hit the start of the second arc of part one last chapter. Part one of yujae's story is encompassed by Wist—there are at least two, potentially three parts in total to their story (therefore 1–2 sequels), and there are likewise three major arcs in part one. In other words: we've got a long way to go, and I'm grateful for anyone who's here for the ride ♡ </p>
<p>I know this chapter was a rough one, but if you have any thoughts, please share! Otherwise, I'll see you next Monday ♡!!</p>
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        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0017"><h2>17. Words We Are Forced to Remember</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>CW/TW: mild implications of sexual assault<br/>—it is not graphic in the slightest, and barely implied, but I need to be transparent.</p><p>Additional CWs: insignificant character death, blood, injury</p><p>Next week should be a Monday update again! =]</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>By the age of six, Yuta was allowed in the smithy—little more than wide eyes peeking around work tables as sparks flew and sweeping up ash. Before then, he’d been shooed out at every turn, and he certainly did make turns to smuggle himself in through exasperating means.</p><p>But six, by his mama’s assessment, gave him sufficient judgment and understanding of what was too close to the forge, too close to the anvil, too close to the sharp creations. From that age onward he was given small tasks increasing and evolving into larger ones until he was more or less a competent apprentice by thirteen.</p><p>So when sixteen rolled around, Yuta already had experience in cleaning rust, hauling, gleaning, filing, deburring. He knew how to make nails and had crafted his own tools with his father’s. He was a proper assistant, and could hold his own.</p><p>But he’d backslid—been <em> forced </em>to—as his apprenticeship started with two fresh others in their medium smithy. For the first time in two years, they had more than just one apprentice. It was back to cleaning, scrubbing, hauling, and though he’d never stopped doing those things as an assistant, it wasn’t to the current levels. A few of his calluses were now sensitive, and his arms burned with forgotten aptitude.</p><p>Iri stroked through his hair for him as he sat at her feet and treated a cut on the meat of his palm with honey. They’d be heading up the hill for home after dinner, since their father was the Journeyman and couldn’t leave the smithy unattended with the fresh sixteen-year-old stock who traditionally spent the first month bunking in the upper story.</p><p>Iri, Yuta, and their mother were there for now as their papa showed the apprentices some last unknown areas, and the only reason Yuta wasn’t with them was because he’d crossed a line.</p><p>The shame and discomfort of it burned far hotter than his arms did.</p><p>“Going back to the basics isn’t a bad thing,” Iri broke the waxen silence, voice taking on that soothing and soft tone she used when she cared—walls down, she was trying, and it was probably all because he’d been crying at the top of the stairs when she’d come from the barracks. Her fingers plucked their way through building another tiny braid at his temple to complete its trio.</p><p>Yuta couldn’t say anything—there wasn’t anything to say. He knew he’d been wrong, and that’s what made it hurt most.</p><p>“It’s a lesson,” she assured him, tugging on a strand as she began the larger weave. “He’s not upset with you and neither is mama. It’s just something you gotta learn.”</p><p>Yuta wiped away a stray smear of honey off his wrist with a wet piece of cloth before fixing a swatch of thin cotton over his sticky cut. It didn’t even sting. He’d gotten sliced where his skin was thicker. “I’m embarrassed,” he admitted, voice even softer than Iri’s so that their mama definitely wouldn’t hear, and his voice was thick with clogged heat. His eyes still stung.</p><p>Across the room, their mama was fixing six plates of sauced vegetables, rice, and boiled egg, every portion identical as the heat of the far hearth against winter kept her tough skin warm. Iri’s fingertips, on the other hand, were chilly. Her ministration still felt nice, a familiar gesture of comfort they’d been doing since they were small. He would offer to do her badger locks later, if she wanted.</p><p>“You should be,” said Iri, making Yuta’s heart lurch. “You can’t flaunt like that. You haven’t earned it.”</p><p>The burn doubled, hissing its way through Yuta’s chest and tempting him to drop his chin. He couldn’t, because Iri wasn’t done yet, taking her time with her four-strand pattern. His instinct to blurt that he hadn’t meant to flaunt—he’d just known more and gotten impatient with having to do things at the others’ pace—was barely curbed by a well-timed and sharp pull at his forelock.</p><p>“It’s a privilege that you grew up having mama as a mentor, and papa’s working hard as her Journeyman. You’re sixteen. You haven’t earned the right to lord over anybody,” Iri said firmly, and Yuta drew his knees to his chest to lessen the feeling of being flayed. “And even if you were older, anyone who tries to look bigger than they are isn’t worth any respect. The people who deserve it carry themselves some sorta way, and it doesn’t look haughty.”</p><p>Finally, she tugged hard on the end of his braid, tilting his head back as she hunched over him and fixed him with her stern expression. “<em> It’s best to be humble, </em> ” she quoted from their mama herself as the woman clacked a bowl down on the corner table. “ <em> And learn from even the smallest of people. </em> ‘Cause I won’t be proud of any bigheaded brother of mine.” That last bit was her own personal flourish, but it stuck and made Yuta’s throat uncomfortable and tight. “Hand me that cord,” she directed, and Yuta obeyed, searching for the strip of leather next to his foot while she kept his head back.</p><p>She let up on his braid as soon as she had the piece, and Yuta crawled his uninjured hand over his face to shield his eyes from their mama, who was looking. The <em> blacksmith, </em> who was his mama, but let him into her craft and trusted him to make her proud.</p><p>And the blacksmith spoke the next moment as if she couldn’t see him cry. “Yuta, get your father and the other two apprentices. Iri, you’re catching lazy language from the ranks. Speak clearly.”</p><p>“Of course, mama,” said Iri, syllables already more articulate, and Yuta said nothing as he picked himself up from the floor to do what she’d ordered.</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
<br/>
</p><p>He let himself drift in the cell from then onward, hearing distantly the wife’s frustration mounting, her desperately invasive hands and hot breath in his ear, her lips, her bites, her fury. It was still deeply painful to have her dig into his arms and legs—she drew blood, and the ropes when they were used rashed him until he bled from those as well—but he’d found a space in his mind that was vindictively passive.</p><p>Nowhere in that realm of new silent suffering was it close to tolerable, however. Life passed in a haze of something that felt like boiling mud, his naked limbs dripping with it on the cold stone floor as bystander eyes flicked over his body and the wife tried to get him to break the right way. The way she wanted.</p><p>His existence was a series of forced destruction and reformation of which he didn’t cope, but heard the words she licked into his ear to drag a reaction out of him screaming . . . and he spent every second of it imagining how the rattle of death would sound in her weak lungs.</p><p>The sessions grew sporadic, flagging after a violent burst of frequency when he stopped cooperating, and eventually the messenger was brought down to pitch her hypothesis on his cold defiance. Her answer was that they should “just put him down, really.”</p><p>She’d looked unnerved when he brought his gaze over to her, his fingers twitching with oversensitivity and bruises patterning his forearms.</p><p>“He’d deserve it,” the messenger added quickly. “He’s been increasingly useless.”</p><p>“He obeys,” the wife demurred. “Just not here.”</p><p>“It’s tied to—”</p><p>“I know,” she snapped and heaved in an agitated breath. She then stood from the floor and leveled herself at a much lesser height against the messenger. “You try, if you think you can do it better, but <em> don’t </em> mark him.”</p><p>The messenger’s upper lip snarled in repulsion. Yoonoh had not dropped his eyes from her, and her gaze skittered away when she found herself locked in contact again. “You know I’ll just break something.”</p><p>“Fine.” The wife dismissed her. “Bring in someone else.” </p><p>She always had to have a witness.</p>
<hr/><p>By the time he was twenty, he was resented more than he was coveted—it was visible in the wife’s eyes if not her mind when she ordered him to use his sources. She tried to force pain into him at the moment his patterns arose, but to Yoonoh, it felt like trying to spark wet wood. He was swamped and mired, but no longer alarmed. She elicited fear, but it was hateful and lacked adrenaline. She made his wrists swollen with pain and his sources still trickled out cold, functional but without vitality.</p><p>It was far less violating to feel disdain and petty exhaustion rolling through his head than craving and sadism.</p><p>Between beatings, he wasn’t sure what he was living for except the moments he was alone, where he was so distant from everything that he didn’t even have reason to drudge through his own self-loathing. He did stretches, he took silent walks around the inner court, he snuck books at the least exposed moments.</p><p>It didn’t feel like life. </p><p>It felt like waiting. Waiting for something newly awful to overcome, if only because it was a pattern he’d learned to rely upon.</p><p>But the cell visits went from sporadic to rare, and Yoonoh had the war to thank for it. For the first time, the city of Ker was contracted and called upon, and every home buckled down to prepare weapons and armor, carts and feed, shoes and horses for departure and battle. Yoonoh knew this because the husband used him as his bodyguard, insured by the dagger from which his hand rarely strayed.</p><p>“We’ll use your feathers for arrows,” the husband laughed as spring edged close to summer and Ienkra called upon Ker’s second draft, the twenty-year-olds giving way in need for thirty. Apparently the enemy was stronger than anticipated, for the husband liked to curse them between overseeing the sectors like they were at fault for such heavy losses.</p><p>Yoonoh wouldn’t know. He didn’t know the motivations of the war—he just knew that he hoped the messenger died each time she left.</p><p>Either way, Yoonoh could not prevent them from doing what they wished with his molted feathers aside from break and ruin them before they could pluck or collect anything. The punishment would be foul, though, so Yoonoh didn’t so much as blink when the husband, with licking laughter, plucked a secondary right in the middle of the weaponry inspection.</p><p>His feathers were loose, so it didn’t hurt, but he preened more fastidiously later, hands tense.</p>
<hr/><p>With greater time away from the basement came greater strength, and he pushed his body to learn different ways to move just so he could familiarize himself with the fresh, hateful terror in the messenger’s eyes every time she was present to “train” him. From the wife, he watched her bitter pout of frustration create lines in her older mouth. From the husband, he found indifferent ridicule superseded gradually by strain.</p><p>In fitful bursts in defiance of his own learned anxiety and repulsion, Yoonoh tried to fly more frequently, if only because he thought himself increasingly more immune to anyone’s admiration. The idea that anyone in the inner court might feel pity still crippled him, but he needed to try. Each pull on his unaccustomed body made him sore, but he was determined not to be clumsy in the sky—that was more humiliating—even as he could feel the sting of the dagger’s range tightening for each meter he tried to climb.</p>
<hr/><p>Finally, the wife gave up on his torture entirely, crowned by an act as invasive as she could ever be. It came barely short of cutting him open or eating him alive, and it felt like being turned inside out, his organs pulsing on his skin in ruby-red flashes. But even then, he did not give her what she wanted.</p><p>She cursed him violently at his ear as he shuddered, everything bleached gray and sharp around him. The air was fraught and frigid with winter, his skin burning against bitter stone and his breath a blood-raw, fevered heat as she dumped water over his wings and bare body, slammed the cell closed, and let him drip tears without moving—except to shiver—as he turned twenty-one.</p><p>The wife did not return. For minutes to hours he stayed there and froze, trying to moor himself only to go under again.</p><p>His clothes were in the corner where she had forced him to undress, piece by piece, when they entered. To fold them neatly and go ropeless to the ground with the dagger tickling his throat.</p><p>He lost feeling in his hands before he was able to knuckle himself up, trembling violently and brain swaying—finger by finger by elbow by drooling tears and pink water from his ragged lips on stone dark as bloodied bruises. His knees gave out before he could even stand, but he was too frozen to feel the pain of it as he heard every shivering splash of water hit the cold puddles on the floor.</p><p>The lantern light was dying as Yoonoh touched himself, every inch with numb hands, slow and hesitant and red with pain. His own skin was tacky and frigid and damp, erupted with bumps, but he stopped seeing or truly feeling any of it as he closed his eyes and felt where she had put her hands. The sting of his thighs where she had run thin lines with the very edge of the dagger, his scratched stomach in raised runs, the wiry hairs, the sensitive skin.</p><p>Every wet shudder in his lungs was stopped up by the time he was done, chin sunken into his chest, throat raw. He got to his feet in a ripple of feathers and nearly staggering limbs, breaths quick and shallow. His clothes tugged on his skin and burned where he hurt, but he wanted them on if anyone came down to drag him out.</p><p>Then he sat, huddled over his own limbs on a dry patch of the floor, angled in such a way to not cramp his tail feathers, wings like a shroud as he preserved what feeble warmth he could produce.</p><p>He wasn’t aware of when the light turned to nothing, eyes closed as they were, and there was little he could do about it anyway. He’d never been taught how to harness his sources to replenish a charm or force it to start working again.</p><p>With no windows, the darkness became so profound that when he did open his eyes, he couldn’t see his own body. His hand, when he raised it inches from his face, was invisible to him. Short of his heartbeat and the sound of his own breath, he was nothing, swallowed entirely and barely existent.</p><p>It startled him out of his own numbness, a bizarre form of mesmerized awe and curiosity mumbling through his head. Never had he been in a darkness so complete.</p><p>He’d been told by the messenger, once, why he was a hateful creature even to the Avia, as if there weren’t enough reasons to be stripped bare.</p><p><em> There’s a crevice in the earth, </em> she’d said, <em> between home and here. Not even the Avia believe you come from the womb of the mountains. You’re born of that dark abyss when someone more worthy than you gives up their life, and you crawl with your claws up the walls into the open air. You’re a thief of breath, and you’re lucky to be alive. </em></p><p>Life was not lucky at all—of that he was certain—but he was far more able to process this darkness. This nothingness, of which he knew there wasn’t a single thing in his company except for the rare slip of water still left between his feathers. When he touched his face, it was as if it was from someone else, but certainly not with the intent to harm. Every tap of his fingertips was a small curiosity even as he was wary of poking himself in a bruise or his own eye.</p><p>And then he stopped moving completely and just sat there, hurting as he was but as still as he could manage, feeling solely the darkness press up against his skin.</p><p>He had never been alone like this. </p><p>It reached into his chest, flesh he could feel but was no longer positive existed. It spread its dark fingers and touched his ribs for him, right down to the ones that had once been broken. It raised the hairs on his neck and tucked in low inside his belly where he had burned that night with bile and disgust.</p><p>For once, he could bear to accept being born. If it was from this. This quiet, this utter lack of knowing.</p><p>The wife wouldn’t have suspected she so graciously offered him total and utter peace for an entire night, or else she would have never allowed him to experience it in the selfsame room she sought to ruin him. But he took it, and he let it seep into his body, cold and dark all the way through until his heart steadied somewhere new.</p><p>In the silence, he cradled his head in his arms, breathing slow and stable, and waited until the moment someone touched the door at the top of the cellar stairs. Light leaked down like shredded rabbit fur, milky and fluttering and insubstantial, creeping down each step in blockish bits.</p><p>The servant did not look at him—perhaps because they too did not enjoy being stared at. He kept his eyes on them, unmoving. He remembered them being down here with him, standing in the corner of the cage like a carved block of wood.</p><p>“The master requires you,” they said as they pulled the cell door open.</p><p>“And if I don’t come?”</p><p>The servant startled. Badly. They dropped the keys and blanched when they had to lower themselves to fumble them back into their grip, and they snapped up to a stand with lurching rapidity.</p><p>Yoonoh didn’t speak to anyone unless it seemed to be required.</p><p>“I will be punished,” they said, numbingly quiet, but that didn’t stop Yoonoh from hearing it.</p><p>When he stood, they shrank from him. He was dirty and ragged and likely stained with his own blood, and he supposed anyone would shrink from so grotesque an Avia—yet he knew what it was like to be punished, so he stood and walked out of the cell.</p><p>His legs had been more unsteady in his life, so climbing the stairs wasn’t so bad that he limped, but there were parts of him that were still newly raw, and the light made him squint and blink and force himself not to shy away. The leaves-bare trees tapped at shingles and beams, a breeze scuttering down from a blank sky into the yawning gray garden.</p><p>“I am meant to take you to her,” said the servant, so he waited until they were done locking the cellar door.</p><p>The basement was on the opposite side of the inner court from any of the masters’ rooms, but the servant led him through the paper corridors instead toward the great room where officials were serviced. He couldn’t imagine the wife letting him be seen by her peers while he was like this, swollen and bruised, but she had done just about everything else.</p><p>He stayed in pattern with the scuff of the servant’s shoes, mind aching. Every time they passed an open corridor, the mild wind tickled his feathers and invited further cold, sufficient enough to make him shiver involuntarily like the cascades of cloth meant to muffle the winter.</p><p>But then the servant diverted, and they entered the library instead of the great room, where columns upon columns of books were slotted into cylindrical hives, their cubbies cradling wooden slips and scrolls and their horizontal shelves stacking books.</p><p>Yoonoh wagered a guess as to why he was here, but the wife was not immediately present—the visible tables bereft of anyone seated at them. The servant told him to wait near the entrance as they circled around the broad room, checking behind curtains with silent politeness. He studied anything he could see to determine if he could read them in the meantime, still harboring that soft, impenetrable darkness in his chest like a new heart.</p><p>When the servant returned to him, they fiddled with their wide sleeves, opened their mouth, then closed it. They stop-started their footing, then decided on their motion and stood on the other side of the entrance from him, pulse ticking twice for every one of Yoonoh’s.</p><p>Yoonoh again waited, applying himself instead for a moment to search for a different heartbeat that he’d memorized out of necessity. </p><p>The wife was definitely not present.</p><p>“Do you—”</p><p>Again the servant startled when Yoonoh spoke, gasping and gripping the front of their clothes over their heart, which leapt and stammered.</p><p>Yoonoh paused, assessing their avoidant profile.</p><p>“Do you know where she was supposed to be before here?”</p><p>“No,” they said, clipped.</p><p>“Where was she when she ordered you to get me?”</p><p>“Her room.” Again, their words were curt, eyes riveted forward.</p><p>Yoonoh considered the bedroom she shared with her husband and let himself grimace, since the servant wasn’t looking anyway. It was winter. Maybe she’d died before she could get herself here, though she’d certainly been alive enough last night.</p><p>When he turned to leave the library, the servant lurched toward him, and Yoonoh edged away on instinct, glancing down at their hand, then their face. He watched their gaze slink away from him. He’d never watched the witnesses to see how they reacted to him before. He wondered if they saw him on the cell floor, if they heard him scream, if they’d taken pleasure in it and felt guilty.</p><p>“She’s not here,” he said simply, watching them cringe at his voice with emotions so distant he merely felt curious before he was lapsed over by that soft blackness.</p><p>“But she will be,” they protested.</p><p>He pretended to consider this, then left.</p><p>That is—he was about to, and it wasn’t the servant who stopped him.</p><p>It was the sensitive and unmistakable swell of magic, a sudden snapping billow down the left corridor that took him by surprise. More than that, it took him by the lungs and winded him, smelling of deep earth in a way he could rarely lift from the air.</p><p>Staggered by the sensation, gathering his wits stalled him for entire seconds, staring down at the doors to the great room where he knew it had to have originated—intuitively, innately.</p><p>Straining his hearing, he heard beyond the large wooden doors the landing blow of feet holding bodies on the tiled flagstones he could picture perfectly. Six, eight, twelve feet in pairs—the sound of steel, the sound of his own heart ramping up and blocking out the rising, subtle sound of breathing. And then a loud, long call of alarm from the throat of <em> someone, </em> cut short through the middle with a wrenching choke.</p><p>The servant behind him stumbled into the corridor, visibly bewildered and frightened by the sound of that cut-off scream, and before they too could gather their wits, Yoonoh slipped away. Specifically, he removed himself from the visible length of the closed hall and sixteen long steps into the open one, a sweep of sudden wind buffered by long bolts of sun-aged cloth.</p><p>He stepped outside of the court walls into the fringing gardens—just out of sight, shoes sinking into the soft dirt—and his hearing exploded with the boom of the great room’s wooden doors being thrown open.</p><p>There was an unhesitating, oddly sonorous twang like a feathered bass note, a similar sound to air being pushed between a gap in someone’s front teeth, and then a wet and immediate landing divided up by the crack of bone and cartilage as the servant in the hallway reached into their lungs to bellow and never managed it.</p><p>Yoonoh had heard arrows being fired, but never like this.</p><p>He had mere moments to process it and the unusual sound of a dead body hitting the floor, the dribble of someone else’s gouted blood splotching stone, before the cloth next to him was ripped back and he was confronted by a deeply unfamiliar face and a sword. The blade was long and straight and covered in the odd remaining sheen of crimson,and a single bead of blood fell from its trembling edge.</p><p>They did not kill him so instantly as they had the others—or at all—but their sun-darkened face was flush with urgency despite being half-covered by a high, thick neck of dark cloth.</p><p>One finger of their free hand came up and tugged the cloth down from their nose, showing lick upon lick of Avia patterning up to mid-cheek despite there not being a wing in sight above their shoulder. This was the second time Yoonoh had seen someone like this.</p><p>There were living bodies in the hallway who had stopped. Yoonoh could hear them breathing and beating.</p><p>“Where are the others?” this person said, voice generous and long despite being dire, clicking at the consonants like mouse claws on the floor in the midst of a melodic liquid. Yoonoh almost didn’t recognize what words they spoke to him for their thick accent. </p><p>“Others?” he croaked, too startled to navigate the rawness in his throat.</p><p>“Others,” they repeated, lowering their sword a fraction. “The rest of you. Are they still here?”</p><p>Stunned, Yoonoh froze under uncertainty. <em> Here? Who? </em></p><p>“Please,” said the intruder, their heart growing louder.</p><p>“I don’t know,” Yoonoh said, and tried to speak with as much honesty as he could muster. “I don’t know.”</p><p>They heaved a breath, blinked rapidly, then vanished back behind the curtain, taking their press of magic with them. A foreign language spilled out of that same person’s mouth from the lyricism and tone, and then was interrupted for one split second.</p><p>There was another arrow loosed, high and quiet, before Yoonoh even heard running feet, and another body hit the ground.</p><p>Immediately, they continued speaking, their tone firm and directive. The group started to run, leaving Yoonoh on the fringe of the court without laying a finger on him.</p><p>The inner wall loomed not far from him as winds lipped off the upper ledge, a blank map of farther court branches, bare flora, and block upon block of stone.</p><p>Yoonoh lunged back into the corridor. “Wait.” His bottom lip split on the word, stinging, and he saw up ahead the blood of a human sunk to the floor.</p><p>All of them turned—including the one who had confronted him. They were all armed, eight of them total. Swords, bows, a metal-tipped staff.</p><p>“What will—” Yoonoh reeled for a moment, scanning their faces and seeing features ever so slightly strange. They weren’t from Ker. They were very possibly not from Ienkra, as he had never heard an accent like that even from the officials from different sectors. “What will you do if you find the masters?”</p><p>The question happened upon him, and it wasn’t out of concern. Perhaps the leader—they had to be the leader—knew that, because their eyes widened. When they hooked down their shirt neck again, there was an odd glint to their magic-patterned and smiling lips. “What do you think?” they asked in that peculiar accent. And they gestured to the body still bleeding behind him.</p><p>All Yoonoh’s breath left him at once, winded for the second time.</p><p>He could see it, hear it, feel it perfectly.</p><p>“Let me,” he blurted. “Please.”</p><p>If they meant what he thought they did—</p><p>The leader unsheathed a weapon from their belt and tossed it flat and low, leading it to skid and spin toward Yoonoh against the stonework floor. It nearly reached his feet, short and simple with a knuckle-bow and long quillons. </p><p>Then, without a word, they were off, running fast but not sprinting, one group starting down the right split that would take them to the center of the court, the other going forward where they would reach the long network of servant corridors.</p><p>The dagger, nothing special, spun to a stop on the floor.</p><p>Yoonoh picked it up, dazed for a single breath by its weight in his hand, its cool and slippery, dull metal hilt. It was heavy and old but glinted sharply in the early daylight seeping just barely through the cloth walls.</p><p>He ran for the great room, and when he jumped over the servant’s dead body as he went, he held onto that corpse’s silent promise of a dead heart.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="big"><span class="u">Trivia:</span></span><br/><b>Honey!</b> Honey has been used for thousands of years for wounds due to its antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties. Dressing with it promotes rapid and improved healing. Scientific studies have continued to rule in favor of its use, though this is by no means me telling you to use the honey out of your kitchen jar for your road burn.</p><p><b>Quillons!</b> Have I talked about quillons? They were first mentioned in chapter 2. These are just cross-guards! They're designed to protect the wielder's hand or to prevent their grip from slipping when they thrust. <em>Knuckle-bows</em> are similar, but—you guessed it—guard the knuckles/fingers specifically. Their protection is not complete, but it <em>is</em> protection.</p><p> </p><p>Did you see this moment coming when you read that Jae turned 21?</p><p>
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<a name="section0018"><h2>18. You've Known a Different Intimacy</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>OOF! Okay. I <em>may</em> not get out a chapter next week because of some family things going on, but we'll see ♡ You guys know the drill by now. If I'm late, I may take a week off to get back on track, but I always will ^^</p><p> </p><p><b>CONTENT/TRIGGER WARNINGS:</b> intimate murder, significant secondary character death, blood, fire, violence</p><p>content warning: mention of bile but no vomiting</p><p>You guys saw this coming—just read with caution, please, and skim if you need to!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p>Within one block of the pleasure corridor, Yuta was already knotting his blue cord around his wrist with one hand.</p><p>“People are going to start thinking you’re taken,” Sayaka said, leaning into his space to pinch one end for him so he could thread the button through the eye. For a moment, they lagged in the middle of the street, a few bodies passing them in both directions—including Aki and Moeri, weaving ahead with their foreheads knocking together over amusement and, probably, the honey-eyed favorite in the Warmth House. Yuta had seen him. He had a heavy, handsome face.</p><p>Yuta frowned and shook out his wrist as they began to walk again, its blue painted bead clicking up against his smithy bracelet. He could hear the faint music, now, from the corridor doorways. “Who are they imagining?” Yuta asked dubiously. Papa had given him this particular color bracelet that, yes, connoted fidelity, but Yuta was so clearly not in a relationship that Sayaka’s words hardly seemed likely.</p><p>Iri had taken him here for the first time soon after his nineteenth birthday, encouraging that he should familiarize himself even if it made him uncomfortable. Her reasoning had been safe and sound (“They teach you how to touch your body if you want it, and how to be safe. It’s not just for intimacy.”), and now he tended to go because his options had diminished to either being in the vicinity of his addled friends or being alone and scrounging the city for a scrap of company from busy adults or kids.</p><p>He did that too, though, every once in a while, but the pleasure staff were interesting and friendly when the hours were slow. Late in the day, there was always music, and for money, there was food and alcohol. He could enjoy that in peace without being approached, but he was gradually warming to the possibility of asking Gen to lay with him. The thought made something flutter behind his navel like a falling maple seed. Anyone else still made his blood run chill with objection.</p><p>“They’re not, probably,” Sayaka said with a laugh then pulled absently at her eyelashes, blinking rapidly for a sudden moment of discomfort. She squinted, and Yuta stopped her this time, tilting her long face down to thumb at her bottom lashline. His hands were clean, and she didn’t shy from him. “I just know they’re looking,” she mumbled as he carefully, delicately pinched a stray lash from near her tear duct.</p><p>“‘Looking,’” Yuta repeated, and tried to tone down a wave of incredulity. “At me?”</p><p>Sayaka blinked at him, dazed for the moment her eye was watery. “Why wouldn’t they?”</p><p>There was something uncomfortable about knowing that people might be interested in him, so he pressed his teeth together and nudged Sayaka to keep walking. “Who are you going for today?”</p><p>Sayaka made a sound halfway between wounded and embarrassed. “Hijiri,” she said under her breath, and fitfully tucked her lengthening curls behind her ears, tamping down any baby hairs with her long fingers. Everything about her was long. “She’s just—she makes me laugh.”</p><p>“That’s really nice,” Yuta said, appreciative, and could vaguely picture it, though he struggled to see anyone in a sexual position, let alone his friend. “Do you want me to wait up?”</p><p>“Not too long,” she said, her laugh breathy and still embarrassed even though sex was all that seemed to run through his friends’ mouths these days. He didn’t mind, really, but her shyness was endearing. “If it gets too late, just go.”</p><p>Yuta whistled for the sake of it just to watch Sayaka burn up on the spot, her face going so painfully pink that he had to giggle. “Shut up,” she hissed, but she was giving that smile she had when she got teased, as if pleased.</p><p>He tapped her lower back, easing her to split off from him for the house Hijiri worked farther down the corridor. “I’ll be in Smooth,” he said. “See you.”</p><p>She loped away from him as he made his way for the first house’s open doorway, the noren a lovely shade of mauve and the wooden floors deep cherry. The air was always fragrant and ranging between gently humid and muggy even now in the early spring, which always excused anyone’s habit of shrugging off their tops if they felt inclined. Yuta had never had that desire.</p><p>Some part of him was still terrified he’d see his sister or fellow apprentices in here even though Iri had been sleeping with Nikko since two summers ago, and Smooth was the beginner house. In here, it was mostly people barely adult and a few regulars.</p><p>Today, Gen was at the counter, leaning naturally in a way fashioned to make his narrow hips and slip of thick, bare waist attractive, though he was only speaking to the bartender. Yuta did not approach, insead sliding himself into the near single table that hugged the wall. He waited and basked in the sounds of windchimes outside the windows and walls.</p><p>When Gen settled in next to him, Yuta didn’t startle but offered a smile, and Gen set his hand on the table palm up. “Let me look at those rough paws of yours,” Gen said, his voice always a lovely, soft burr.</p><p>Yuta mastered his blush and did as suggested, letting Gen use his silky fingers to brush out his loose hold into a splay. Gen’s hands were much bigger than his—Gen was big in general, though Yuta had finally become taller than his own mother last year.</p><p>Pleasure trickled up Yuta’s left arm in quick streams as Gen began to knead, pressing his touch into Yuta’s palm, his muscles, stretching and sliding his fingers. He rubbed at every callus from the smithy tool rough spots to the ridges from the weapons he practiced with Iri. </p><p>“How was work today?” Gen asked, intent, eyelashes prettier the longer Yuta looked at his well-humored profile. His earring caught Yuta’s eye too, a snippet of simple silver.</p><p>“Good,” Yuta mumbled, relaxation already snapping like a lazy pennant along the back of his skull. “The Change Faction has gotten some push, so we’ve been commissioned for greater defense.”</p><p>Gen nodded and slid a practiced finger under Yuta’s bracelets—both of them, sending a shock and tickle all the way up to Yuta’s inner elbow. He then looked at Yuta directly, eyes placid. “How are you feeling?” was Gen’s next question, a euphemism he’d asked every time Yuta visited for the last three months. With it, he glided his free hand up from Yuta’s wrist to the bottom edge of his bicep in one smooth motion.</p><p>Yuta felt himself swaying in before he even realized he didn’t have his head on straight.</p><p>But Gen didn’t close the gap, waiting for him to say it, and Yuta swallowed, mouth dry. “If—if you’re free.”</p><p>Gen smiled readily, warm, and tipped Yuta’s chin up toward him.</p><p>His first kiss made him feel nervous and drunk, and his first time in one of the back rooms smelled of honey. It happened with smoked bees humming around in his brain, shivers of heat sucking through his nerves like patient murmurs of a soft mouth. </p>
<hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>Yoonoh had known that corridors existed between Ker’s walls since he was first brought into their ownership. It was impossible to miss heartbeats, breaths, footsteps where he was sure they shouldn’t have been. He knew this world—his only world—intimately, because knowing every corner, tile, and piece of cloth gave him control in a seemingly vast lack of it.</p><p>So he slid into the library, feeling the hurt in his body but finding it didn’t stop him and didn’t have to stop him. He pried his hand between a bookshelf column on the farthest right side of the room, low to the ground for the latch that would swing the nearest panel open. Crouching hurt; he ignored it. Running down paper hallways hurt less, but maybe that was because it was bringing something he wanted toward him faster.</p><p>It took three lengths of hallway to nearly slam into a servant, who he’d heard but for once hadn’t truly processed, and they hugged the right wall instantly, curling into themselves on apparent instinct.</p><p>Their rattled breaths of shock trickled after him, as he had not personally spared them longer than a brief lagging moment.</p><p>He didn’t know for sure whether the wife would be in her bedroom, but he’d had over fifteen years of serving her, and winters made her slow to act. She never minded making him wait; it was her sole virtue. While she dawdled, he found respite.</p><p>Today would be the same.</p><p>He slowed down only when he reached the last of the service corridors and instead searched for those that were much more hidden, snaking his free hand along thin wooden beams to dig his nails into just the right crack. He’d only explored these once when he was very young and first discovered that his old room, much closer to the masters, was connected to theirs. He’d been one breath away from getting caught, so he never returned. But he had a good memory. It was the only thing life appeared to owe him, and he was rarely grateful.</p><p>In these secluded passageways, shrouded by the thick paper patterning and intermittent drapes tucked across the walls, Yoonoh slowed his breathing and snuck his steps. The early-morning silence beyond those walls was broken up by humans who might care more that someone was running through spaces they thought were empty, and by the last corridor, he wanted to be heard by her least of all.</p><p>Possibilities composed themselves in his head.</p><p>The husband could be there, she could be gone, she might hear him before it was opportune, she may be wearing the dagger . . . The husband was not there.</p><p>She was.</p><p>Heartbeats were all the same, and he couldn’t tell most people apart. There was very little that set one pulse apart from another, but the little things tended to coalesce if his brain found it necessary. As much as he hated the intimacy with which he knew her, he could distinguish the twitch of her heart from the next. Her valves, her blood, the size of her heart and how it fit amongst her organs, the way in which it pumped when she brought him to his hands and knees, and the fluttery flush in her throat that implied pleasure at his pain.</p><p>She was alone.</p><p>That was simple enough.</p><p>Like her heart, the layout of the masters’ room was one he had long had memorized. The bed was sunk into the floor, broad and sprawling. Long drapes slung down the front and back walls, currently verdant. A square table, covered and kept at the right temperatures, was embedded in the wooden slats. Two long tables hugged each side wall, half laden with a variety of records, small beauty bottles and pots, half-cleared platters, jewelry and hair accessories, inks for script, weights and rolls of fibred papers—tidied every day, several times a day, often by his own hands. <em> War, </em> he’d read more than a dozen times in its many different euphemisms off stray papers, cached in his mind with the particular strokes of the wife’s brush.</p><p>In the times he ordered her makeup, she’d smudged his hands once or twice on purpose, a new kind of bruise rubbed into his skin to be similarly mocked and admired. Her painted lips on his hairline.</p><p>She sat at the one to which he was nearest.</p><p>Each slide of her comb went neatly through her hair, which she had forced him to touch hundreds of times. Her scalp, the nape of her neck where she shivered, and the revulsion in his hands would be so harsh that he could feel it in his nail beds like blood swelling up under the keratin.</p><p>Yoonoh tried to place where the dagger was—it was <em> his </em> enough to scope it, to feel its itch for his stolen and stripped blood, energy, magic.</p><p>Still behind the walls, Yoonoh circled to the other side, wondering how much time he had before the court came alive at the eight intruders. It had already been minutes.</p><p>He drifted his fingertips over the wooden beam holding the very corner of the room, eyes steady to the space where he could hear her heart perfectly, though he could not see her from how and where the daylight seeped in through the court.</p><p>There wouldn’t be a way for him to enter the room without her hearing, so he took the dagger in his hand and tucked it under the cinch of his trousers between his clasped suspenders and skin, fixing his shirt around it so he could draw easily but in a proper place hidden by the fold of his wing so she wouldn’t immediately see. He wasn’t permitted to hold or own weapons outside of his training with the messenger, though he’d found himself imagining many things as weapons from time to time.</p><p>The edge would likely cut him as soon as he pulled it, but he didn’t much care.</p><p>He reached with his other hand to grasp the edge of the wall panel, holding it on either side, and tested how much noise it would make when he lifted it from its slot in the floor.</p><p>The very second it budged, he heard that any greater movement would very much be audible to human ears—even distracted ones.</p><p>He braced himself, rooting his insides to that diminishing sense of peace and quiet he’d found what felt like days ago but had only been hours, and pulled the panel up and out.</p><p>The wife whipped around in a sash of black hair, and above the winter-fever flush of her cheeks, her eyes widened, hard with alarm.</p><p>“There’s been an attack,” he told her, setting aside the wall and stepping into the room, noting the sick-heavy staccato rhythm of her breathing. The bed was between them, coiled with heavy silks, and he stepped around it.</p><p>“Where?” she demanded.</p><p>He deliberately forced his eyes to look at the proper door to the room, as if checking. Then behind his shoulder back at the secret corridor. When he brought his eyes back to her, she was reaching for the dagger—inscribed perfectly with the name they’d given him on the day of his arrival, though they had never taught him what his name looked like until that point.</p><p>The burst of his source through his right thigh, the jab of his knee at a distance, felt like his fist connecting with the supple flesh of a living body, and the impact of that stored energy—as enfeebled and drained as it was—splintered the table inches from her hand. She screamed, recoiling from the burst of pottery and powder, arms up to protect her face as the dagger spun and skidded to the wooden ground.</p><p>Yoonoh’s heart crackled.</p><p>“Here,” he said.</p><p>She screamed again as she scrambled for the dagger—calling, this time, for the messenger. Then her husband. Yoonoh tucked back his wing and drew the weapon he’d been given, heavy with metal all the way through.</p><p>When he threw it, he adjusted for that knowledge even though his wrist was sore and the length of his forearm rippled with protest.</p><p>And it was bewitching how he missed in just the right way, and the blade, instead of piercing her upper arm as she lunged for the dagger—body lengthening, fingers crawling—slipped over her bicep and cut snug right across the bottom of her jaw and the fragile well of flesh under her chin.</p><p>He felt a phantom prickle under his face as her whole body lurched from the shock and terror, her arms changing trajectory, palm slapping to the splash of crimson with the suddenness of covering an exposed secret, the bone over which her flesh had stretched flashing white.</p><p>The tears came, welling and spilling, her lips fluttering as she fell back, away, her heart louder than he had ever heard it.</p><p>And it was horrible how this, too, became a nightmare.</p><p>He picked up the dagger—the one with his name—and felt it in his hand for the first time, a wound festering and blithering along the calluses in his hands as he unsheathed it from its casing.</p><p>She sobbed through her nose as her face drained of the blood that spilled over her knuckles.</p><p>He held her shoulder with his free fingers where they clamped around the sheath, the very first time he’d ever touched her of his own volition, and experienced a scalding flash of emotion through her eyes. He’d been in her head too many times. She thought, for all the beauty she claimed he encompassed, that he was worth less than a single fragment of a human life.</p><p>He was a thing, a pet, a treasure—he knew it. That wasn’t a fresh scar.</p><p>The blade struck up through her solar plexus, piercing through resistant but soft muscle and skin. She left her neck with both hands and grappled with his arm, raking lattices across the fine inner plane of his flesh, gasping and choking, bubbling, furious.</p><p>Welts on his skin rose like a tartan, bleeding as she smeared him, and her palm smacked his open face with pathetic fervor, trying to push him away. That had never happened before. Her blood was hot as it pooled over his grip, as he held the blade in her and felt her muscles pulse against his knuckles. Her heart faltered with staggering thuds.</p><p>He saw her tongue try to writhe out his name in spittle and how hot blood continued to rise like water, spilling over the unblemished skin of her neck. The stress point in her forehead flinched, her legs spasmed, her lungs ground an inhale down to dust.</p><p>She sank to the floor. </p><p>And diminished in ways he didn’t realize a body could. He had never seen someone die.</p><p>He remembered himself then. His breath shuddered loudly in his own ears, cascading against the rough edges of his body up and out, in and through. He didn’t realize he was shaking until he tried to get a better, less slippery grip on the handle of his dagger.</p><p>In the confines of his skull, he felt an overwhelming berth of extremes so harsh he could only feel nothing, but he could at least hear his own heart scraping his ribs and the pound of feet responding to the screams he’d silenced.</p><p>When he yanked the dagger from the clutch of her flesh, it uprooted crystals of crimson in a streak that lashed his thigh. Warm.</p><p>His insides heaved, and then he gagged on a gasp—something far more like a laugh, stuttering out of his chest in raw, wet ribbons. He stood, swaying and desperate to wipe his hand and dagger off regardless if it was his own clothes.</p><p>He was turning when the door slid open so disastrously fast it angled off its grooves, and he knew it was the messenger because even if hearts were difficult to distinguish, the sound of someone walking or running—the patterns with which they shifted their weight, landed it, settled it; the displacement, heft, toes, heel, crack of their knees, hip problems, ankle weakness—was like a thumbprint. </p><p>Without a breath of hesitation, Yoonoh pulled from his thighs again for the distance he couldn’t cross, but this time something went differently, and the power hissed and swept out of his body in a nearly tangible whip-crack. That is, if that whip were a wave that started at the tip of a blade he could suddenly feel intimately, scalding through his throat on the way out until he tasted blood. If it tasted like a scream he’d once let out and pain ringing through his skull, ash in his veins, power being stripped from his skin. </p><p>If it broke the entire wall and beckoned the snap of bone, which was always much, much louder than he ever expected.</p><p>The messenger stumbled back from the impact and caved to her knees with a wheeze, face blanched with pain and great wings sagging, while Yoonoh spasmed with the dredges of his own hurt, sucked up through the dagger in confused memory. </p><p>Her feathers heaved as she rattled pressured breaths. Her palm struck the floor, arm cradling her barbed middle and a cowlick showing itself in her shorn hair.</p><p>Yoonoh staggered, gripping the dagger harder as the far wall juddered through the slight wood beams for the force, and the paper waved like torn flesh.</p><p>He lurched, compelled to run but finding that his periphery was crumbling into sheets of sodden unconsciousness. He obeyed the former urge, and dodged the messenger’s hand when she tried to reach and grip his ankle. Even as his vision spun in uneasy disorder.</p><p>He’d killed someone.</p><p>There was the pulse of her muscles, there, against the hard knuckle of his thumb.</p><p>Again, Yoonoh staggered, and again he made a sound so close to laughter and too near to tears, a harsh, unmelodic rasp through his throat.</p><p>He didn’t just kill someone. He’d killed <em> her. </em> She was dead. Gone.</p><p>His vision tilted, and his shoulder slammed into a column, body pitching and one wing flinching out to balance him like a rudder. His throat tasted of bile as he sagged for a moment he couldn’t control.</p><p>Sounds like screams or death or something greater began to trickle into the air.</p><p>Fire.</p><p>It clicked in his brain before he saw anything at all. He heard snapping beams and sizzling oil, leaps and bounds and crowns of fire. He reeled into the garden, legs unsteady, and saw smoke above the shingled roofs and the garden’s bare tree branches.</p><p>He didn’t know—</p><p>He didn’t know what was happening. What to do.</p><p>Black crept again into his vision and he fought it off.</p><p>The great room. Surely.</p><p>He still held the sheath and belt in his clean hand.</p><p><em> “Yoonoh!” </em>he heard the messenger screech with the pain of bellowing against broken ribs. She sounded truly and properly like a bird for once in her life. </p><p>He fumbled to strap the belt around his waist, clumsy and desperate.</p><p>
  <em> “YOONOH!” </em>
</p><p>Every breath he took was crashing and weaving in his body, drunk and possessed. His shoulder hurt. His body hurt. His throat was raw and hurt with every swallow. He sheathed the dagger and felt its fire leave his wrist like a different flame guttering out.</p><p>
  <em> “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE.” </em>
</p><p>He ran—this time sprinting, trying to keep his vision clear as her shrieks declined, but his body was spent and he spilled himself once against the wooden floor of a corridor, staring at his fingers, his tendons, the blood on his sleeve and caking every crease and pore and hair across his right hand.</p><p>The laugh, again, came forth, his own emotions inscrutable to him. He felt angry, somehow, then devastated, exultant. He’d never laughed before. Not really.</p><p>It meshed with screams and desperation the way he was sure laughter normally didn’t. The fire was getting louder. Death was getting louder.</p><p>He picked himself up from the floor, sure he didn’t want to end here even if he knew nothing else.</p><p>The closer he got to the great room, the more bodies there were, and the fire was roaring. He hadn’t done this, but if anyone had given him the option to burn Ker down, he would have leaned into the weight of it and singed his hair for how close he would get to the flame.</p><p>If the husband didn’t die through various means, he would lose everything—from the book in the library dictating the different ways to kill an Avia to the willow in the garden that looked too old to still be living.</p><p>Yoonoh staggered through the doors of the stone great room as fire breasted the hallways behind him, sucking winds up into its cataracts of blossoming yellow and orange, the clouds massy and thick and black. He dripped sweat, the room already starting to limn with smoke.</p><p>There was a pit floating above the center of the floor like a specter, plainly visible but oddly colored. It seemed to deeply enhance the mild, stone hues surrounding its image and nothing more.</p><p>The longer he looked at it, breath shaking through his burning lungs, smoke weighing the world down, the less evident it was—second by second.</p><p>Yoonoh couldn’t hear anyone running for this room. He hadn’t seen the intruders since they arrived.</p><p>But this was magic. He knew it. And he knew that they arrived from here, hitting the floor suddenly with their feet as if dropping from a distance, however small.</p><p>He knew nothing for certain, but he also had nowhere else to go.</p><p>Closing the steps between his body and it, he reached for the diminishing magic and pushed his fingers into something far more substantial than he ever would have expected. His hand vanished though the enhancement, the air cool on the other side. He could feel rain across his bloodied knuckles and his wrist buzzing like he’d reached into a humming throat.</p><p>He stepped up into thick air and fell his way through, collapsing onto mud and grass, hearing a world full of voices, hearts, a boiling storm, and metal.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="u"><span class="big">Trivia:</span></span><br/><b>Blue!</b> The connoted meaning of blue being fidelity is a Japanese influence, and this is not a strict association—blue is associated with young women, the pure and clean ocean, etc. and to my knowledge, blue's association with fidelity is not taken with as much seriousness as, say, white's associations. It has a number of other meanings/feelings associated with it, especially when taking indigo into account, so my usage of it here was a <em>very</em> subtle nod, as most color references will be in Wist (just as they are in real life—subtle). Fun fact: blue and green used to be the same word in Japan, represented by the word 青 (ao). Indigo blue is different: 藍 (ai). Indigo dye has a cool history in Japan if you want to look it up!</p><p><b>Demisexuality!</b> Yuta is on the asexual spectrum—specifically demisexual—wherein he only feels sexual attraction to people with whom he shares an emotional bond. Like with all sexualities, this does not mean he's sexually attracted to everyone he's close to. It strictly means that sexual attraction for him only comes with time and a connection. Canonically, Yuta has been demisexual since the very beginning, and I wrote him as such. <em>But he knows Jaehyun is attractive!</em> you say. Yes! Knowing someone is attractive and being attracted to them are entirely different things. You'd have to be dead as a doornail to not see that Jaehyun's handsome. <em>He makes suggestive jokes!</em> Yup! If you're curious about demisexuality and how it works for those who identify as such, feel free to look it up!</p><p><b>Beauty!</b> Using this generally, and I won't go too deep into it. The wife uses a <em>comb</em> because <em>hairbrushes</em> were a Western influence. Powdered tints in pots, saucers, jars, and similar were used throughout history in East Asia, derived from a variety of ingredients. I'll go into hair care more deeply sometime when Yuta has his shit together (I say that with love; he is simply not the paragon of self care at present).</p><p><b>Crowning!</b> I used "crown" earlier with creative liberty to imply the concept of "crowning." Ker's fire was not actually crowning, though. A crowning fire is one that moves from tree to tree (or shrub) through their crowns, independent of the main body of fire. That is, it's traveling a lot faster and more freely through the tops of a forest, and it's usually due to excessive fuel accumulation. It's extreme nuance, so I'm only adding this little tidbit because personally, I find the way fire moves fascinating and used the word to deliberately indicate how disastrous this fire is.<br/></p><p>
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<a name="section0019"><h2>19. The Voice Is a Fragile Thing</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>A very late update! Family matters were more difficult than I expected them to be ;; I should be updating next Monday—hopefully this time in a timely manner :C</p><p>Please note that while I have read over this to check for clarity, I was trying not to fall asleep as I did so. If there are things that don't make sense, come back in a few days and you'll probably find all those things magically fixed. In the meantime, I am so sorry for anything lacking in its usual polish.</p><p>As a whole, given what this chapter covers, I very much hope it's still enjoyable ♡ There's some necessary ground to cover, then we'll start picking up pace.</p><p>TW: significant minor character death (brief mention, not graphic)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>According to his papa, before Yuta even learned to express himself with words, he would react to Iri like a plant to water or a flower to sun. He learned to crawl and it would be impossible for his three-year-old sister to go anywhere or do anything without him taking profound, big-eyed interest. When she laughed and giggled at being lifted and tossed and wrestled and poked by their parents, Yuta’s body would act with pleasant desperation to be near.</p><p>She had a tendency to push him away with her feet, but unless she did it too harshly and he toppled, he never seemed to notice that she might not want him there. She was the riverbed, he was the creek.</p><p>It was a miracle he didn’t copy her aspirations for the ranks, since he copied most other things—from her braids to her favorite color—but he always had a penchant for fire and metal.</p><p>What a bewildering thing it was to be burned.</p><p>He’d been up in the middle of the night to pee.</p><p>How mundane.</p><p>She’d been home for the last day of the week as she always was, but given a few more months, she’d be patrolling winters along the border trade routes.</p><p>He would have seen less of her, but his pride over her competence could suffer the loss.</p><p>Their mama had been upstairs, and not even apocalypse could wake her.</p><p>As Iri and he well knew for some near-disastrous mistakes they had made over the years in their own home.</p><p>Their papa had been in the city proper, as he always was as Journeyman, divorced from his wife’s bed to wrangle apprentices who thought themselves clever.</p><p>He claimed to sleep very well whenever he was home.</p><p>Magic was purple.</p><p>When powerful enough to flatten a city, it was purple, and it tasted like blood.</p><p>Though Yuta was fast enough to beat his sister in a sparring match; strong enough to haul, pull, pound tonnes of ore and metal; clever enough to sleight a bun from his friends’ bowls—he could not unpin himself from under the rubble. Through hysteria and agony and defiance and defeat, he could not reach his dead sister. Neither could he reach his mother, who was closer than he realized from the half-collapsed second floor.</p><p>And though he found his voice eventually, he was trapped there for hours, sobbing and screaming until the taste of blood wasn’t much of a phantom anymore.</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
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</p><p> </p><p>Everything crashed into Yoonoh as he gripped the sodden earth, wheezed, and coughed, dizzied by the grip of magic—from the rain hissing down and riddling the soil to the sound of couples, dozens, hundreds of living bodies. The sky above him, his eyes blinking into the scattering droplets, the dying color of the portal behind him that belied blazing smoke.</p><p>Breathing fast in panic through a ripped throat, he had approximately seven seconds to clutch the mud and see without obstruction, though the sounds were overwhelming.</p><p>Flapping, tan and indigo cloth structures splashed with sediment were erected on all sides of him, his body sequestered in the crux of four. A cascade of voices welled from under every tethered sheet; whispering, conversing, shouting. Metal, flesh, cloth. Farther down between each structure were organized fields to the left; a wooden building up ahead with a pennant snapping out front; earth and shrubbery melting into thousands of rustling trees stretching to his right; and bare, muddied earth and more closely-settled tents behind, where the portal had nipped itself out of existence.</p><p>A wind poured itself out amidst the weather, caught Yoonoh under the wings, and forced him to scrabble with the long weeds in his grip as the air sibillated in his ears and scrambled his vision. With a desperate shudder, he reached for one of the heavy ropes rooted by metal in the earth that strung the structures up.</p><p>Too afraid to stand, he dragged and crawled himself forward, closer to the tent to cut the wind. The blood on his knuckles was turning pink and dripping off his skin in shades of rose. Mud sunk into his knees and sandals.</p><p>He could hear a heart thudding in the corner of the rectangular tent as he clutched himself nearer.</p><p>Metal, somewhere, was sharpened on a wheel.</p><p>It was so sudden, grating, and shrill that as soon as it entered his ear he cringed his head down, face pressed against his shoulder.</p><p>A swell of words ruckused up within the tent so close to his shivering body. That same accent. Generous, weighted, melodic.</p><p>Boots pounded, suctioned, and splashed as a group of bodies dashed and slid under the rain. Yoonoh gripped the rope harder, trying to push each sound out of his head one by one. Pain was starting to crick up the back of his skull, strongarming him into a spinning wince as the lightning of a migraine flickered in the corners of his vision.</p><p>Rainwater slid into the creases of his eyes and stung with the salt of sweat before he could wipe it all away, and with a jolt from the skies, the persistent drizzle turned steadier, harder.</p><p>The shrieking of sharpening metal renewed itself with a fervor, and Yoonoh ducked his head further, wings shrugging up to block some of the sound amidst a gasp of resistance. His mind could pick out the isolated sound of too many things. He could begin to hear lungs, a whistle of breath through someone’s teeth and nose, a shuffle of leather and clothing.</p><p>Clenching his eyes closed, he huddled as much of his body as he could under his wings, hands clutching hard to the rope as he tried to block and muffle the unknown.</p><p>He’d done it before, but he had never been lost like this.</p><p>Worse, he’d done this to himself, and he could not return.</p><p>Yoonoh heard a sharp call, two syllables, closed by the tongue at the very last sound—immediately to his left, just around the corner, voice delivered so clearly that it had to be—</p><p>When he opened his eyes, he immediately shrank from the image of a person standing tall between the two tents nearest him. They stared directly at him, palm on the cusp of their sword and their clothing the color of trees—the brown of bark, the green of leaves. They had a wide, frowning mouth.</p><p>The bodies inside the tents surrounding him dimmed in their life and noise-making. All at once and on instinct, Yoonoh let go of the tethered rope and plunged to the right, around the tent toward the building, fingers clawing at the earth for a single moment’s leverage and one of his nails chipping immediately on a sudden paving stone rooted in the ground.</p><p>Two syllables again, louder this time, and the tents to his left and right came alive. </p><p>Yoonoh ran, trying not to slip as best he could, and the stonework and building became everything in his vision until lightning cracked with ambivalent distemper, and Yoonoh—badly dazzled by the lightning and thunder, ears ringing, strained, and exhausted—staggered and tripped on the uneven flagstones as they stuck up from the wet earth.</p><p>His palms ripped themselves against jagged edges, and he nearly clipped his face against the ground. Shaking, dizzy, and struggling to breathe, he curled up, deluged by too many sensations all at once. </p><p>He barely registered the yelling around him, pilled into a feathered little heap protected by his wings as the skies coughed down oblivion.</p><p>When he was yanked to his feet by the scruff of his shirt and half his hair, he went where he was pushed, vision swimming—up the stone walk to the painted building, though he ducked his head and tried his best not to look anywhere at all. He could tell he was surrounded by aggressive voices, but could no longer manage to register them.</p><p>He tripped again at the lip of the building, was yanked back, and fell when whoever held him was pushed away from him. Yelling surrounded his ears, even the melodies of this foreign language harsh now.</p><p>His palms smeared pathetically on the flagstones as he pressed himself up from the ground to the nearest wall, innermost, protected against the wind and rain.</p><p>The people left him alone to figure out what he was touching, what color and texture the wall was, the discomfort of his contorted position against the wall as he tried to make himself smaller than he could be. He didn’t dare to move, his fingers cramped against the red-painted wood where they pinched, palm stinging painfully. </p><p>Crouched, he pressed his face to the cold, slatted wall and tried to drag his mind back to the present for the survival of it alone. </p><p>He sought out the movement and sound in his periphery, colored as it was by his migraine.</p><p>There were only three people firmly in the current space, though Yoonoh could isolate the sound of others briskly leaving the premises against the stonework, and there were two more squeezing through the entry, hugging the cloth-hung doorway away from Yoonoh.</p><p>One of the three people, blurry as they were, was familiar. He hadn’t realized they had longer hair. It was knotted and plastered to their skull and jaw, two crossed hair pins coming loose, and their shirt’s high neck was hooked down beneath their chin. They spoke rapidly in this unknown language as they pointed in Yoonoh’s direction. This was the same wingless Avia who had given him that metal dagger, no longer in Ker.</p><p>The person they argued with stood in those browns and greens, jaw clenched but their hands slack. The third person stood close to Yoonoh, not far in front of him, and stared at him so intently that he froze all over again.</p><p>Their frowning mouth made them look like they were the person who discovered him at the tents.</p><p>Yoonoh carefully pressed his hip closer to the wall, trying to hide the dagger, then flinched the second one of the other two figures moved toward him.</p><p>It was the wingless Avia, and they splayed their fingers in protest when Yoonoh shrank from them. They approached no further, a meter away and backdropped by a central dias that Yoonoh didn’t have the focus yet to perceive. </p><p>This person pointed at him deliberately and said, loud and clear, a single word. And then gestured far to their left, paired with the word “Ienkra,” which Yoonoh knew. Then they pointed to themselves and made a sweeping, all-encompassing gesture. “Syltris,” they said—again almost painfully loud and clear.</p><p>Yoonoh was confused, unsure why someone who had been fluent in his language no more than a couple hours before was now resorting to gesture.</p><p>Bewildered, Yoonoh shook his head then immediately winced at his migraine pinging hard up his neck and across his skull.</p><p>This person faced the person they’d been arguing with, sharing rapid, agitated words all over again, and their opponent argued right back, voice low and hard. They had dark, heavy eyes.</p><p>The Avia tried again, facing Yoonoh.</p><p>They pointed to him, repeated the single word, then gestured to their weapon, sheathed at their hip. Yoonoh noticed their single empty sheath at their other hip and felt a surge of fear. He heard nothing else until the person waved for their attention.</p><p>Point, same word, gesture to weapon, “Syltris,” and then they made a garish, unsightly face, scrunching their fingers around their mouth.</p><p>“I don’t understand,” Yoonoh said, feeling stupid with fear and pain, and aggravated that he might understand otherwise.</p><p>But then he cowered when the dark-eyed person made a violent motion toward him the second Yoonoh finished speaking.</p><p>Immediately, the intruder blocked their lurch with their arm, shouting defiance, and when the aggressor yelled in their face, Yoonoh saw those magic lines crop up around the Avia’s mouth.</p><p>The third person barked the two same syllables Yoonoh had already heard, and Yoonoh picked them out—“Jae-hyun.”</p><p>A reprimand. A name.</p><p>This Jaehyun visibly forced themselves to relax, but nonetheless moved their body directly between Yoonoh and dark-eyes’ reactionary wrath.</p><p>This argument was short, and it ended with the third person gripping Yoonoh by the arm and leading him back out into the rain and thunder. Or they tried, but it was difficult. Even getting up from a crouch made Yoonoh so dizzy he almost blacked out, and he found himself clutching the front of their verdant garb.</p><p>The process of walking him out into the wooded fringe was a sloppy one, this person half-hauling him as darkness crept in the corners of his sight. His body was giving out—dehydrated, trying to heal, overburdened and overexerted.</p><p>They let him fall to his knees and injured palms between two trees, then crouched as wet shivers wracked his body and the rain slew against his aching skin.</p><p>“You go,” they said in thickly accented Ienkran, but hearing something he understood didn’t make him less dizzy. </p><p>“Where?” he wheezed, barely turning his pained head toward their voice. He could still hear the bodies behind him, not far from him at all, but he stared down at his grimy hands—more dirt than blood now.</p><p>“Go,” they said, as if they only knew two words in Ienkran. They stood and left him there, and though Yoonoh preferred not to cry when unforced, his body was so exhausted that it didn’t seem to know what to do otherwise.</p><p>But he forced himself to crawl forward, then stagger to his feet, pushing onward through the trees to widen the distance between him and the living, and lessen the rain under a sparse canopy.</p><p>He barely remembered ever being surrounded by so many trees—whatever memory he had of forests were young indeed.</p><p>When he stumbled, he fell, and when he fell, he fell to one arm down to his shoulder, wing clumsily bucking against a tree trunk to escape his collapse.</p><p>There, no more than minutes away from the tents and yelling and metal, he curled up in the mud and drowned in the cold under his free wing.</p>
<hr/><p>Someone tripped over his outstretched leg, but Yoonoh was so numb he only felt how it badly jolted his hip and pulled on an injury. He’d known he’d be cut by drawing that dagger, and he had been. He just hadn’t the headspace to realize it until it hurt worse than his head.</p><p>That someone swore, and Yoonoh knew Jaehyun’s voice by now.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” they blurted, and pried his wing up to see his face as the torrent continued. “I don’t have time, and I can’t open another portal while—”</p><p>Yoonoh’s vision was blurry and difficult, but he did see them glance up, then back down. They fingered one of their pins, grimacing. </p><p>It took hearing the next thing Jaehyun said to realize that whatever accent they’d had in Ker was suddenly gone. “You’re in Syltris. Ienkra started a war against them, and Avia are blamed. You will not be welcomed anywhere, you hear me?”</p><p>Yoonoh found it within his lungs and throat to reply to their migraine-splotchy face. “Yes,” he croaked, though he wasn’t sure what he was agreeing to.</p><p>“There’s a city not far from here if you keep heading in this direction. They will reject you at the gates. Find another way in and follow the music,” they said, their words getting faster and more urgent. “Pretend you’re mute. It won’t matter. Clean up, be handsome, they’ll want you.”</p><p>Something sudden and heavy was thrust against his shaking torso.</p><p>Yoonoh jerked to clutch it against his shirt-plastered skin before it slipped to the ground, and its outer cloth was rough against his scabbed and dirtied palm. And dry. A filled sack.</p><p>“Force yourself to get up. Find shelter. Change. Eat. Wait the rain out. I have to go.”</p><p>And then they were gone.</p><p>His head swam, but he could manage pain if he had a reason to.</p><p>Yoonoh struggled to an elbow, brain pounding disastrously, and scrabbled for a tree with one hand until he could pull himself to his feet.</p><p>He kept the bag under the shroud of one wing but rested his shoulder and head against the rough bark of the tree that helped him up, waiting for a wave of dizziness to pass.</p><p>Move, shelter, change, eat, city, music.</p><p>Yoonoh moved, little more than a body with wings.</p>
<hr/><p>The rain passed quicker than suspected by Jaehyun’s words, but that was the sole thing that kept Yoonoh from dying. The sunlight was mulish and heavy, and it staved off a chill that would have killed him.</p><p>Only then did he drop to the sodden earth and pry open the sack. He knew hunger and thirst, so when he found pounded rice cakes and a skin of water, he had very little of it. He sat in the broken awning of the trees where the sun lashed through and let himself bake until he stopped shivering from the cold, though he kept shivering for everything else.</p><p>There were clothes, a hunk of used soap, and two coins in the bag.</p><p>Yoonoh had never held money in his life. It felt seditious.</p><p>His head was killing him in ways being drenched to the bone had numbed.</p><p>In truth, Yoonoh only remembered the basics of this part of his life; the combination of effects was too severe to manage otherwise.</p><p>He crashed into a stream halfway out of the woods. He stripped and shivered and cleaned his heated, pink wounds, scrubbing the blood in his cuticles away with the ruined cloth of his old clothes. He rinsed and wrung those and forced himself to hold them after changing, though said changing took him a long time. There was no metal latch on these clothes—just dead ends and holes, though he had his suspenders.</p><p>Whether he figured out his clothing properly or not, the cloth was dry and eventually warm to combat his wet sandals that picked up sediment and grated as he continued toward a city he wasn’t totally sure he would ever reach.</p><p>He could be heading in the wrong direction.</p><p>It was impossible for him to know at the time.</p><p>If he’d had more of a mind, he would have spent it trying to parse how he would get into a city that didn’t want him, then how to be handsome. Or how to convince people without speaking that he was worth taking in.</p><p>Or how to hear music over the throbbing drum beats in his head.</p><p>Instead, he left the woods, then stumbled right back in, gazing blearily at the wide road down the hills upon which the forest breached. He could see people traveling along it with carts and carriers. He could see where the entrance ought to be if his vision weren’t marred.</p><p>The city was a bluish gray from a distance.</p><p>Yoonoh, upon seeing it, couldn’t breathe for his exhaustion anymore.</p><p>He retreated further into the trees, touched his forehead to a trunk, knelt, and dissolved himself under the encircling fold of his wings.</p><p>He dreamed of nothing despite his burgeoning fever, his body too spent to conjure up phantoms. When he woke, it was night.</p><p>Categorically unfortunate, luck did not grace him. Chance did.</p><p>The clothes Jaehyun had given him were dark, and so were his feathers, and though he did not have the energy to fly much, he crossed the greater distance just by opening his wings and gliding.</p><p>But the city walls were ones he had to get over through proper flight, and half his conscious effort was spent listening for the steps of the guards roaming the perimeter and stone top.</p><p>He did get over them, though, without detection. It took an immense effort that had him steadying himself for entire minutes against crates shoved up against the wall on the other side. Trying not to pass out was new for him—escape had been generally favorable.</p><p>He found this funny and laughed quietly as he leaned and tried to steady his heart, and he found that laughing hurt worse than shaking his head did. The city was alive with sleeping hearts and not a scrap of music.</p><p>Not hearing a patrol on the inside—not yet—he remained where he had landed. The buildings nearest him were tall and quiet, crammed close together withstreets he could only begin to see that cracked open their proximity. The ground here was just dirt even as the wall was stone. The barrels and carts and crates were old, but did not give under his meager weight.</p><p>He ate a portion of his food again with a third left to stave off a worse fate than idling inside a quiet city, and for the first time since Ker, he preened.</p><p>In this corner of the city, there was no light to preen by aside from the stars that drowned out the black of the sky in a busy swath. The moon was small and feeble.</p><p>The night was chilly.</p><p>It hit him that he was free.</p><p>Yoonoh’s next breath was too deep, and it rattled in his chest like loose wind through his ribs. He tried to focus on zipping his feathers but lost himself in the memory of the wife’s blood and muscle caressing his hand. The clotting, blackened whorls of smoke. The messenger’s shriek.</p><p>Yoonoh touched his hair, his face, his new clothes, and the—no, <em> his</em>—dagger at his hip inscribed with his name. It had known him. If he touched it, he could feel it sting and react to him like the prickling pain of tears.</p><p>He didn’t feel real. His face, his skin, his clean hands weren’t real. Within moments, he no longer could fathom his fingers or how the marble and clay facades of the buildings closest to the wall weren’t just paper and cloth.</p><p>Bile rose to the back of Yoonoh’s throat, and he pressed his fingertips to his eyes, shutting it out, out, out. He hissed through his teeth—inhale, exhale—to swat away an errant breath and murmur in his ear.</p><p>Music.</p><p>He thought he heard music.</p><p>Banishing anything other than that—a brief, mistuned melody cut off at the throat so, so distant from him—Yoonoh dragged his sack off the top of the crate that had held him upright and began to walk.</p><p>The bottoms of his feet were becoming raw, and his knees didn’t have a lot of strength, but he hugged the wall and moved toward the vague approximation of that cut-off music’s location.</p><p>Though his head was still foggy and hurting, he began to plan.</p><p>He had seen the servants beg, rubbing their hands together. He had seen that money could gain favors. Smiles could placate. Obedience was soothing.</p><p>He would not understand them, but he remembered what Jaehyun said and could realize that his tongue would condemn him even if there were someone who could speak his language.</p><p>Stupidity was nonthreatening. Clumsiness could add to that impression, but he could only be clumsy with his own things, his own body. Mishandling others’ possessions lacked charm.</p><p>His headache returned with a vengeance, but the melody resumed with greater resonance.</p><p>Yoonoh refocused on the music.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I'm not . . . totally sure what trivia to give here, honestly! I <em>did</em> base the place Jaehyun (Yoonoh) arrived in on Japanese war encampments, using jinmaku and akunoya with leaders also staying in shrines (the painted, wooden building; I kept it vague on purpose because in Wist, it's not the kind of shrine you're thinking of). I'll clarify those two Japanese terms!</p><p><span class="big"><span class="u">Trivia:</span></span><br/><b>Jinmaku!</b> These are big, hemp military curtains used in pre-modern Japan. Tied to poles, these are meant to provide protection for sleeping troops. The number of poles to rig the jinmaku, their colors, the tethers, and the emblems/symbols can be significant.</p><p><b>Akunoya!</b> Tents, basically, created from jinmaku with roofs and more support. Tents were <em>not</em> common in Japan. Japanese troops relied heavily on billeting (staying temporarily in a permanent, nonmilitary facility) and otherwise slept out in the open protected by—you guessed it—just plain ol' jinmaku. I compensated this history by including the wooden building (pseudo-shrine), but for the purposes of actual Wistian logistics and culture, this encampment was purposely not placed in a township/city/etc.</p><p>
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<a name="section0020"><h2>20. Buried Under Bodies Other Than Our Own</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>With this, I will be taking the month off. Along with some life events, I'm in three fests, and for WHATEVER reason all three fics are due this month. You'll see one soon if you're subscribed to me, but I'm not sure when the other two will be revealed.</p><p>The next update will either be on May 31st OR June 7th. There's some leeway there. Last time I took a long break from Wist, these men ate me alive. It's a challenge to update every week, but it's also frustrating not to. Maybe you'll see me on June 1st! Hard to say.</p><p> </p><p><b>CW/TW:</b> death mention, grief, injury, blood mention, illness, sex work<br/>—Regarding the last tag, none of the sex is remotely explicit, but the way Yoonoh tackles it <em>is</em> complex, as you can imagine.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>By the time Nikko found him, it was day, and Yuta had descended into a haze of pain and silence, every breath taken through his nose tight, shaking, and shallow. He couldn’t feel parts of his body, and others he felt too much, and Nikko calling Iri’s name felt like a nightmare.</p><p>The number of times Yuta had met his sister’s lover were fewer than ordinary—Nikko’s family was on the other side of the city, and the ranks kept their people busy from dawn till dusk save rest days. What he knew was this: </p><p>Nikko had been giving Iri trouble since they’d met at seventeen, an archer who outpaced her eye by far but was a laughing shit with an axe. She could beat him easy, but she always came home almost every day with her stories knotted up with his bullshit. </p><p>Nikko also knew how to make their parents laugh.</p><p>Iri had loved him for a long time.</p><p>When Yuta heard Nikko’s voice, he was too dehydrated to cry and too raw to call out, and he was too afraid to hear his sister’s name. He hadn’t been alone in the house, but he’d been the only one screaming.</p><p>He rasped an attempt at responding to Nikko’s calls. The sun gaped through the ruined roof and floor, one of the central bearings having collapsed along with the outer walls that faced the city—those same ones Yuta was pinned under. He couldn’t move his left arm, his right leg was broken and trapped under a beam from the ceiling, and he couldn’t wiggle his other leg from the rubble. He knew he had to be bleeding, but he hadn’t passed out for any length of time longer than a couple hours at most.</p><p>And this was the beginning of when he thought, maybe, he’d rather be dead.</p><p>He knew.</p><p>He knew when Nikko’s voice was the first one he fucking heard—not his papa’s, not, miraculously, his mama’s or Iri’s.</p><p>Nikko’s.</p><p>“Yu<em>ta!” </em> Nikko called this time, cracked and freshly strangled, and Yuta tried. He really did. But it was a hard thing to make sound through the rock in his throat, building into a cry he couldn’t expel; it felt like his neck might split open and bleed his arteries out onto the shattered planks.</p><p>Yuta heaved breath through the narrow passage grief left for his nose, parted his cracked lips, and made a sound he didn’t recognize from his own mouth—no sound he’d been making for the past night sounded like himself.</p><p>It was someone else rending their body.</p><p>Couldn’t be him.</p><p>He knew, he knew.</p><p>And Nikko looked so blanched, like rice patties and rotten straw, sweating from the seams and covered in dust and ash when he stumbled into view, nearly spraining his ankle on the loose rubble, probably, for his pained swear.</p><p>“Yuta,” Nikko gasped like a mantra, like supplication.</p><p>“They’re <em> dead,” </em> Yuta keened, ground to blood and nothing, like a pillar crumbling to dust.</p><p>“But you’re not,” Nikko pled, tears scraping down his face, and when he lifted the beam, Yuta screamed.</p><p>He knew, he knew, he knew.</p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>There wasn’t much left of Yoonoh when he pressed himself against the doorway of the house that held the music—the first of four, all spinning melodies now like a discordant, stippled hymn.</p><p>People had seen him on the way; his mind had ached to a halt too soon, and his body struggled to do more than his foremost intention, so he did not know how to hide in a foreign city. He did his best to tuck his wings, but people still stared.</p><p>At least, he knew, they weren’t like the people in Ker. Those liked to touch. These gave him a wide berth.</p><p>But he was trying not to slide down the doorway, now, where the long, stiff sheets of red fabric at the entrance grazed against his wings as they settled back from where he moved them.</p><p>The ringing of chimes tamped to a stop, one of a handful of people in this front room pressing their hands down on curved plates of metal. That had to be the instrument, studded out across a tapering sweep of wood, but Yoonoh’s vision was difficult and blurry, and he couldn’t make sense of shapes anymore. The fatigue was tying him down ligament by ligament.</p><p>These people immediately spoke foreign words to him, one shooing him with their arms, and he, in turn, exhausted, pressed his palms together and lowered his head. His hands shook as he tried to wordlessly convey pleading. If he could trust himself to stand up again, he would have fallen to his knees to beg, but he thought his feet were bleeding and that collapse would be final.</p><p>His hearing was greater than the distance his body had been prepared to carry him.</p><p><em> Please, </em> he wanted to say, and couldn’t.</p><p>The bag slung to his shoulder slid down to his elbow, and his sapling body almost bent with it.</p><p>His vision spun in sweet reds and daring blacks, twirling to a close.</p><p>He blacked out for only as long as it took for his knees to hit the ground, breath pale between his lips. So he pressed his forehead to the wooden floor, freckled with dust, black wings furled but exposed for them to see in their entirety.</p><p>It was a relief to fold, to be off his needled feet. His body swallowed it down.</p><p>If he recognized any words, his mind couldn’t process them. Being pried and pulled from the floor was universal, though, and before the spinning in his head could ruin their hard work, his arms were pulled, frame jostled, other hands on his waist in avoidance of his foreign matter feathers, steadying him.</p><p>Yoonoh had never been carried like this in his life, and though the dredges of his brain flinched and reviled to be manhandled, he didn’t have the reserves to do anything about it.</p><p>He was dumped on the floor somewhere else, cloth scratching scross his flattened ear, chest to padded ground and wings slumping.</p><p>There was a clatter, a small slopping splash that spilled against his lax hand where it lay on the mat they had dropped him upon.</p><p>And whatever couple of hearts had been in the space with him were gone with a sweep and fall of cloth, passing beyond the torpid thuds of his own tired heart.</p><p>He reached for the water first, hand so shaky as to only wet his mouth, and he could only force himself to be conscious for about that much.</p><hr/><p>For the first three days in the city, Yoonoh’s body gave up. He’d been ill before, but not to this degree, and he remembered crying when firm hands went to clean his feet. He also remembered something like a rattling hiss hashing out from between his teeth the second someone passed their touch along his body, muscles contorting to escape them until they found the wound on the edge of his lower back. That made him see lightning and spots, and he stopped trying to avoid them even when they peeled off the cloth there to clean it.</p><p>Later, he understood that they had every reason to let fate do with him what it willed. Later, he sat on a stool when the sweat and fever had mostly passed, and forced himself to hear patterns and words so he could understand that this lady of the wooden house with so many living bodies milling in and out was asking for his name.</p><p>Hers was Keptae, his was, “Jaehyun.” Exhausted, stolen—his first real theft other than books and a life.</p><p>It was his mistake to prove he could speak, but he was suspicious from the start.</p><p>“Speak,” she mimed to him, each word she spoke slow and syrupy between thick lips. “Speak.”</p><p>“Speak,” he whispered back.</p><p>“No!” she expressed. He watched a thick curl of black hair slide off her shoulder, artfully loose. Most of the bodies in this house that he’d seen repeatedly were compelling if not beautiful. “You. Speak.”</p><p>For whatever reason, they left his dagger alone. He was not so tired, now, that he wouldn’t be able to draw it if necessary, though he was afraid to. The feeling it had left in his wrist and hand had been ugly, and not a decent night had passed without him remembering how it felt to have a bloody body try to swallow his fingers.</p><p>He generally slept badly or not at all, but there was a lot to bury himself under.</p><p><em> “There’s a mouse in your walls,” </em>he said in Ienkran, and he suspected her sound of disgust was not because she understood.</p><p>She slapped the table between them with her open palms, fascinating face distorted by discomfort, and she shooed him to “Leave.”</p><p>She did not say where, so he returned to the room they’d allowed him, or hidden him in. It was far in the back, small, and had a mouse in the walls.</p><hr/><p>He was right to assume she wasn’t telling him to leave the city in its entirety. Someone entered that same room only a handful of hours later, a coat wrapped around their naked chest for how openly their collar bones stood out against the dark cloth.</p><p><em> “How did you get here?” </em>they asked in Ienkran without introduction. Their accent was as thick as the one the wingless Jaehyun had faked in Ker, and Yoonoh had recovered enough to read between the lines of the question and the accents. They stood near the door while he knelt, but they were remarkably short, so it didn’t pose much of an advantage.</p><p><em> “I escaped,” </em>said Yoonoh, and their expression curled into something unknown. He was not yet well versed in all faces.</p><p>
  <em> “From where?” </em>
</p><p>They were certain already, he was sure, but he would let them condemn him. <em> “Ienkra.” </em></p><p>This time they nodded, face pinched. They were wearing makeup in colors he’d never seen anyone wear. <em> “Keptae doesn't know what to do with you.” </em></p><p>Yoonoh remembered what his liberator had said, and Yoonoh said in turn, <em> “She may use me.” </em></p><p>He would bear it.</p><p>Again, they nodded. They then patted their cheeks as if they wished to rub their face but couldn’t, nodded again, and told him to wait.</p><p>No less than a few minutes later, Keptae and he had a translator.</p><p>“What did you say to me earlier?” she asked him, apparently.</p><p><em> “There’s a mouse in your walls,” </em>he repeated, and the colorful translator wrinkled their nose.</p><p>“What, what?” Yoonoh could recognize her saying, and the translation involved a gesture at the walls. Yoonoh mimicked mouse ears for her.</p><p>Her look of disgust was different than the one she had given him earlier.</p><p>She tapped her ears. “You hear well?”</p><p>He waited for their translation, though he suspected what she’d said. His mind was racing to try to unearth patterns—they were there. He could hear them. He just had to string them together, puzzle them out, copy the way these people’s lips, teeth, tongue moved so he could bury his own accent. He was determined to. His voice was flexible.</p><p>“Yes,” he attempted in her language, an easy word. He knew he was in Syltris—he recalled that much—so this had to be Syltrin. It was that same melodic, interesting core with crisp, subtle consonants. Ienkran sounded more rapid and flipped its vowels down, but the words were also built differently, certain sounds hugging each other in Syltrin that he was only starting to catch.</p><p>The conversation was a long one, doubled by the translator, but by the end of it, Yoonoh was promised a week to learn what he could of this building, and if he proved he learned quickly, Keptae would talk to him then.</p><p>For now, he would do menial tasks in the meantime.</p><p>He didn’t have to ask what he had to learn to be good at. He had a pretty good idea, because he’d already been watching and listening. One of the men had already bound his wings the Syltrin way thrice after being towed to the baths one night, not far from the four houses. The baths in this city were half underground—not raised but dug down—and hot. </p><p>His body did not in the least prefer the heat, so he’d resorted to using the cold water they seemed to use to clean themselves before bathing, solely washing himself with buckets and small bags sewn with grain, scrubbing the dirt that had started to imprint into his skin, sloughing off dead layers in murky grey bits, and skimming water through his feathers, waiting to shake them out until there was no one there to see him do it—since, very occasionally, there were drunk bodies in the baths late at night. They preferred to stare and say unmelodic things, even if Yoonoh couldn’t yet understand them.</p><p>He could barely endure being naked under strangers’ eyes, and if they hated his wings and tail as much as they made evident, he didn’t care to subject himself to further nausea.</p><p>But Keptae reacted well to his appearance when he was cleaned up, and even better when his wings were tied—as did everyone else, as if the knowledge that he couldn’t spread them ensured their safety.</p><p>As if they had actually disarmed him, though he wore his dagger unfailingly unless he had to wash.</p><p>This, he discovered, was because everyone was armed. They weren’t armed visibly, however, knives and daggers hidden under their folds of clothes or needles in their hair. He seemed to have stumbled into courtesy by having his own weapon so blatantly out in the open, and by the time he realized that, he had to wrestle with deep unease that they could draw his weapon just as easily as he could.</p><p>And he still wasn’t entirely sure how the dagger worked.</p><p>But in any case, these people were a myriad of services. They taught, they entertained, they cooked, they sewed, they pleasured. They all individually wore a dash of prominent color each night, not always the same. His color was consistently green; green in the twine that bound his feathers, green in the hems of the dark clothes they adjusted for his wearing. According to the translator, this denoted “reserved”—as in “spoken for.”</p><p>Which was as much of a hint as any, but for the week he spent watching and listening and teaching himself Syltrin until his head was swooping, none of the patrons looked his way for longer than a moment to identify his color. Not unless they were morbidly curious, entranced, or repulsed by his long tail and silhouette of his wings.</p><p>So though he suspected he knew what was coming, the Avia who had saved him was right to send him here, toward the music, and they were right in guessing what Yoonoh was good at already.</p><p>No one questioned his presence, regardless of their reaction, because everything had a purpose in a pleasure corridor.</p><hr/><p>“Do you know how to have sex?” asked Shogo halfway into the second week, after Keptae had approved of him on some level or other. </p><p>Yoonoh knew basic questions and almost certainly the word “sex,” which had a few different permutations. Much like the word “war” in Ienkra.</p><p>“No.”</p><p>Shogo then said something very Syltrin, something like a swear, which Yoonoh only understood vaguely to mean “You forsaken thing.”</p><p>It seemed appropriate. Shogo also seemed to full-heartedly enjoy being one of the most sought-after bodies in the Singing House. People, in turn, seemed to full-heartedly enjoy him, and though the walls were certainly thicker here than the ones in Court Ker, Yoonoh could still hear a great many things.</p><p>If that was what sex was supposed to sound like, he wasn’t sure he even knew what it was.</p><p>What proceeded felt bizarre. He didn’t expect Shogo to strip, and he wasn’t sure what to do with himself once he did. Instead, he pressed his eyes around the room, much nicer than the one he boarded in. Most of the rooms were quite nice in this place; his own was one of two of a similar shape and plainness that he was reasonably sure were typically meant for people who were too wasted to leave the house at an appropriate time. </p><p>Only some of the workers slept in Singing. Shogo, for whatever reason, was one of them, and this room was his, cluttered with small handmade treasures and gifts his patrons had given him. There was a gold-plated feather, long with forcefully rigid plumulaceous barbs, shaped like one of Yoonoh’s primaries—large enough to be one—hanging from a mobile on the ceiling, spinning the candlelight into fractals across bolts of bright cloth and glazed porcelain.</p><p>“Jaehyun.”</p><p>Yoonoh startled at his new name then gazed, suffering, in the direction Shogo was gesturing.</p><p>He did not relish gazing upon this man’s penis. He didn’t even enjoy looking at his own skin, but at least Shogo had a squatter frame than he.</p><p>“This is the male body,” said Shogo, and it was painful to Yoonoh that it took him five entire seconds to parse what Shogo meant, because he didn’t particularly enjoy appearing involuntarily dull. Especially not over something so unpleasant.</p><p>Nonetheless, everything that proceeded was mildly wretched in one way or other—either because he was learning a new word every minute or because he was obliged to investigate said male body. Shogo was imperious, but not cruel. When Keptae told Yoonoh he’d be learning about sex with Shogo, his body had conjured up so many phantom images that he’d felt his mind shut down.</p><p>He was arguably shut down, now. His fingers felt very cold, and the single blade Shogo wore as everyone did was hung around his neck, sheath rising and falling with his breath between slow words and a grip on Yoonoh’s wrist.</p><p>Nothing Yoonoh had pictured resembled his own hands touching Shogo, and he got an answer for his unasked question near the end, when Yoonoh felt like he’d been shown every possible patch of skin worth investigating.</p><p>“No one’s going to want to touch you much,” Shogo said plainly. “They have a few options, but your anatomy . . . ” He waved his hand, gaze lacking in generosity. “You’re inconvenient. We won’t give you people who prefer to do the fucking.”</p><p>Yoonoh was forced to memorize those words, unsure what half of them were until he repeated the sounds back to himself in variations and puzzled them together. He had to ask another worker what “anatomy” meant, then “inconvenient,” and it all fell together by then.</p><p>It clashed with something within him, but the vast majority of his psyche was sick with relief.</p><p>Learning this part of the trade felt easier, though it was by no means easy.</p><p>He couldn’t do certain actions without losing a sense of location, of body, of time. He dropped entire sentences he was given when his next instructor was a woman. She seemed to think him preciously tongue-tied by her beauty, because at that point, he could string together more than a few words with his mouth—most of the time without an accent.</p><p>“Good hearing <em> and </em> you pick up languages quickly,” Keptae had said before he’d ever met with Shogo, and patted his face. He flinched from her hand, and she stared at him. “Ah,” she said, and left it at that.</p><hr/><p>Shogo was right, in the end, but at the start, he never saw a bedroom.</p><p>He made action into a language so he could endure it, and what his body was repulsed by turned into a detached fascination. Behaviors he had learned in Ker could be turned on their head—to lure, to appeal without saying anything at all, to learn an entire language from the lips that spilled them when they starved to be heard.</p><p>Yoonoh learned some people bit when they kissed, or used tongue, or suckled like beery lips at the edge of a bowl. For the first weeks, it would only go as far as that—memorizing the trace signals and body language, kissing them—before they were coaxed away by another worker because, as Shogo said, “We pleasure in the bedroom. We don’t bumble.”</p><p>Which was not his first review of how difficult it was for him to climb the inner walls of intimacy.</p><p>If he’d spent a little longer bumbling, things might have turned out fine. Or at least differently. He couldn’t fly in the city, which meant the pain was setting in; the messenger had shown him how to work certain muscles, but that was upon the assumption that he was still able to stretch his wings. He was healthier otherwise than he probably had been his entire life, but he was getting unfamiliar with his hands again.</p><p>Differently.</p><p>Things would have gone differently.</p><p>But he didn’t enjoy acting slow when it wasn’t necessary to survive, so he learned and adjusted with the rapidity of which he was capable.</p><p>His first experience was blurry, and his blood felt hard and unmoving in his veins, rocking back and forth only with motion like swill at the bottom of a well. The only things he remembered were his fingernails, because he couldn’t quite remember cutting them, and the color of his skin, which was paler than the body he held himself over. The sun had started to leach from his skin, and he could almost see the creeks between and over his tendons.</p><p>His first experience was with a she, and he remembered almost none of it.</p><p>Bruised by some form of aggression or clumsiness, his bottom lip was tender in the morning, and he could feel the deed in his body—neither sore nor aching, but there. There were always traces that then faded, with varying levels of genuine recollection.</p><p>“Some people aren’t made for it,” Shogo had told him after the second time, finding Yoonoh staring at his palms like it was a meditative sport (these were the same hands that were lipped at by muscle and blood, and the entrances of the lower body didn’t feel much different). “But supposedly you can get it up, which is good enough.”</p><p>“What do you enjoy?” Yoonoh found himself asking, though one vowel flipped down, and he rolled the word in his mouth, feeling an emotion—displeasure—for the first time in hours.</p><p>“Control,” said Shogo. “Being better than everyone else. These people come to me, and I don’t give. I take. Obsession, lust, desire—they give. They try to take from me, because they want something, but they give. I take.”</p><p>Yoonoh only roughly understood. He couldn’t figure out how to be present at all, just yet, let alone know what he wanted enough to take something. But he would later. Much later than Keptae saying, “We’re getting you out of the city.”</p><p>To which he said, “Why?” He didn’t use that word often. It had weight, to him.</p><p>“One of the court lords wants an escort, and he’s heard we’ve got an Avia. He’s convinced you’ll be useful, and I didn’t raise my price in time to realize you’ve got . . . ” She gestured widely to his body. “ . . . abilities. I told him you can fuck, which was the lowest bar anyway.”</p><p>“I don’t know what an escort is.”</p><p>She snorted, probably amused because he didn’t ask about “abilities.” As if he’d need to. He knew what she meant, but he didn’t realize it wasn’t common knowledge. Perhaps that explained why the only thing they were afraid of was his wingspan.</p><p>“You’ll take him Northward along the border. He coordinates and manages supplies for the war.”</p><p>War.</p><p>He’d heard many, many things about the war from the patrons of Singing, but he’d seen nothing of it. The war was over four years old and he still hadn’t seen it.</p><p>“You are to stay beside him, protect him, and pleasure him. Come a few months, and you’ll be back here in time for crops to be sown,” she said, and she began to unravel her cloth bag of makeup, which meant he should leave within the next few words. “He’ll gather you in four days, but you will work until then.”</p><p>Four more bodies. <em> Control, </em>he wondered, then left.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p><span class="big"><span class="u">Trivia:</span></span><br/><b>Emargination and Plumulaceous Barbs!</b> <em>Emargination</em> is when the anterior vane (the thinner side) of a feather narrows—usually about halfway up. This is seen on primary feathers, the outermost wing feathers responsible for thrust. <em>Plumulaceous Barbs</em> are just the fluffy feather stuff I've talked about before—barbs without interlocking barbules—that you can find at the base of many feathers (primarily contour).</p><p>Am I missing anything? This one felt a bit sparse on the "wtf is that?" end, but please feel free to bug me for info!!</p><p>Ah! Note: <b>green</b>'s symbolism is adaptive, here, based upon its relation to blue (as explained two chapters ago). It has other meanings across East Asian cultures, and was used in the same way (to bind Yoonoh's wings) much earlier on in the fic for a different symbolism. Namely the Chinese meaning of cleanliness to balance out his perceived impurity.</p><p>
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